Health care, the quantified self, web 2.0

Health care, the quantified self, web 2.0

The Evidence Gap - Health Care That Puts a Computer on the Team - Series - NYTimes.com: "MARSHFIELD, Wis. — Joseph Calderaro, 67, is one of health care’s quiet success stories. Over the last four years, he has carefully managed his diabetes by lowering his blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol with diet, exercise and medication."

Quantified Self
Introspection 2.0

Web 2.0.
O'Reilly's notion of Web 2.0 is profoundly more powerful than the buzzword its become. The core difference is collection of relevance implicitly vs. explicitly. One feels alive; one dead.

When
--individuals collect and selectively 'publish' personal metrics
--when health care systems possibly Kaiser, Cleavland Clinic mine and selectively publish that data
--others use the result for new research on both a personal and institutional level
we will have an explosion of knowledge and practice

Heart rate monitors and GPS :: the landscape

Many players; many products.

These notes focus on products which can export their measurements in some machine readable format.
Some gadget oriented people have older models to loan. If you want to try one, ask your gadget oriented friends.

Garmin

Garmin makes a bewildering variety of GPS devices. A few are specialized for exercise and training. They are sold under the Garmin Forerunner brand.

Suunto

Suunto also has a wide variety of devices. In most of them don't support GPS. However, just as many photographers sync photos with GPS routes by getting the timestamps in sync, Suunto exercise logs can be synced with GPS routs.
Chris Carmichael, best known for being Lance Armstrong's coach, has a company which specializes in on line training advice and coaching. They are partnered with Suunto -- using the Suunto T6. However there are many similar coaching services. If one signs up with Carmichael, but one has been using Polar, the old Polar logs are curently useless.

Polar

I still have a Polar device I began using about 20 years ago. Now they also have a wide range of offerings and like Suunto, they usually don't include GPS, but many work with a special GPS pod sold by Polar.

Trainers and Training Software

Chris Carmichael, best known for being Lance Armstrong's coach, has a company which specializes in on line training advice and coaching. They are partnered with Suunto -- using the Suunto T6. However there are many similar coaching services. If one signs up with Carmichael, but one has been using Polar, the old Polar logs are currently useless.

Training Peaks evidently does offer some integration of data from multiple devices. It claims to support data from 70+ devices. A quick look indicates that the underlying model is primarly one of time and calories burned integrated with a record of calories consumed. I'm sure many people find that interesting, but not me. I wonder if it only uses a common subset of data? Could a better product be designed by examining its weaknesses? Their costs start at $20/month, a fraction of Carmichael's Train Right.
TrainingPeaks provides links to a variety of articles. Personally, I'd like to see a platform that would allow plug-ins to provide specific approaches to analysis and training program generation. Some may be a bit specific to the TrainingPeaks tools, but offer significant insight.

Problems to Solve

• Integration of GPS data with HR data -- probably through use of timestamps to integrate the two data streams
• Integration of exercise/GPS data from multiple devices/vendors.
• Common View/Controller for all data streams.
• Provide constant evaluation of risk :: too little exercise and stress vs danger of breakdown, illness and stale feeling