Tag Archives: quantified self

Getting patients back to normal

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All opinions my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

Inspired in part by this column from David Shaywitz

Here is a story I had the privilege to hear from Fred Modell, one of the founders of the Jeffrey Modell Foundation (check them out; they’re a great group):  Fred was at their annual picnic, where they host kids with immune system defects.  Fred walked by two early teenage girls, and as he passed by he heard one of them asking the other, “You really kissed a boy?”  Which seems like a common enough thing for two teenage girls to be talking about.

Only in this case it wasn’t.  If your immune system doesn’t function like most everyone else’s, then kissing a boy is not just part of growing up.  It can be dangerous to your health. It’s something  about which you have to think hard, and try your best to understand the implications, and you need to be careful, cautious and measured.  Everything your first kiss really shouldn’t be.

For these girls, though, because of groups like the Modell Foundation and the treatments they’ve helped pioneer and support, these girls could experience the spontaneity of an event that so many kids take for granted.  And they could feel normal, like their friends in school. Continue reading →

Cheetahs hunting: a coda on sensors

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I really need to keep up with my back issues of Wired.  After posting about the possible use of portable sensors in sports to monitor defense and skills, I came across this feature  in Wired about different kinds of sensors, including one made by X2 Biosystems to measure head impacts.  This system uses a small, adhesive sensor, placed behind the athlete’s ear, to monitor the force of head impacts in real time.  This provides additional data that coaches and medical staff on the sideline can use in judging whether a player should be allowed back on the field or not after a blow to the head.

I’m curious how sensitive these sensors are and whether they could or do record less extreme events like rapid acceleration and deceleration while players run on the field.  The nice thing about the X2 system is that information is collected in an application that allows collation of health care provider information and clinical results as well, keeping data in one place.   I’m also curious if the general, anonymized data will be made publicly available.  According to the Wired article, a number of collegiate and amateur sports organizations are gathering data as part of a central initiative, presumably to monitor and prevent concussions.  It would be interesting to see if other things could be studied from that data.

Cheetahs hunting and the quantified self

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Who doesn’t love cheetahs?  A young person of my acquaintance went so far as to spend a large portion of her time, at a certain age, cavorting on all fours and yipping and chirping like a cheetah.  And of course we all know that cheetahs are the fastest land animals, and that’s how they catch their prey, by outrunning them.

Only that’s wrong.

Yes cheetahs are wicked fast, reaching about 60 miles per hour, but a recent report in Nature has shown, via novel monitoring techniques, that maneuverability and deceleration skills are the keys to successful hunting.  The researchers designed a new type of monitoring collar that included GPS and accelerometers.  No word on whether the collars also allowed cheetahs to play Words with Friends.

This report highlights the things we can learn as we get better and better at measuring.  Conventional wisdom may remain or be turned on its head, and either outcome is fine.  The key is that we have a better  basis upon which to understand that wisdom, that we don’t take things for granted, that we question our assumptions.

The cheetah collars also point to how we can gather so much more data on individuals, whether furry or bipedal (or both), than we ever could before.  I’ve recently been made aware of the quantified self movement (HT @bkolko), and what they hope to do is in line with what was done with these cheetahs.  Take individual monitoring and data gathering to new heights.  No, it won’t involve tracking collars (unless, you know, that’s your thing).  But it will involve using technology to measure what previously we could only guess at, and enable decision making and research in new and powerful ways.