Our data, our solutions

Our data, our solutions

”Collective intelligence for individuals is stupid.“

Mark Carranza said that at the Quantified Self Conference last month in San Francisco.

The words have stuck with me:

Mark cuts right to the heart of what the Quantified Self movement is all about.

Think about it.

Our society has a habit of collecting other people’s data and giving us advice on the basis of that data. It’s how people sell us the latest diet and it’s how researchers develop the next therapy: they test how something works on other people, on many other people. And they are not looking for differences, there are looking for commonalities.

Now, that is not a bad thing. I am happy that Aspirin exists. I am happy that it works for me and for millions of people around the world.

We are different

But we humans don’t only have things in common. We are also very different.

Take your Resting Metabolic Rate.

This is the measure of how many calories you burn while you rest. And guess what: your resting metabolic rate is different from mine. You may burn 3000 calories as you rest while I burn 2000. With such differences, how big is the chance that any one diet works for you as it does for me?

And the Resting Metabolic Rate is just one parameter. What do you eat? How do you exercise? In short, how do you live and how do the things you do influence each other?

Today, we have the technology to find out.

We can measure what happens inside us. And we can make that data work for us. That’s what Project AddApp is here to do. And that’s what we should demand from others too: to make sense of our data. To give us solutions made for us. That is what doctors, dietitians and fitness trainers should do.

Soon this will be normal.

The market is up for the taking, the future at our doorstep.

And the past is already gone: it no longer makes sense for us to buy solutions made from other people’s data.

Kouris Kalligas

Co-founder

Is smoking a cultural or a health issue? A personal story from a quitter…

Coming out of the gym after a massive two hour cardio and toning session, I felt tired but very happy.

“I’ve done it’ I thought “I’m getting my fitness back”.

Ten months earlier I had managed to quit smoking.

I went from one pack a day to two cigarettes a day and within weeks I was condescendingly wafting away the smoke of others. Had I been an addict? I don’t think so, but it was definitely part of my daily routine and admittedly I enjoyed it.

That coffee with a morning cigarette getting ready to start the day, the first inhale when you’ve finished work and can finally relax, and of course there’s nothing better than a few drinks on the weekend sharing the pros and cons of life with a cigarette sitting comfortably in hand. Originally I smoked when I was stressed but it became this daily part of life I barely noticed.

Time to quit 

With time however I had began to feel the effects. My skin felt dry, and my hair began to lose its shine. Did I detect a few more wrinkles on my upper lip and did my eye bags look darker? I started to feel like I couldn’t smell anything, be able to taste the wine I liked so much, or walk up a flight a stairs without feeling breathless. The moment I became stressed, frustrated, sad or depressed I immediately turned to lighting up another cigarette, and another, until my throat felt dry and I had a persistent cough. It was time to quit.

Positive momentum

The greatest motivator was doing sport. There is nothing worse than running on a treadmill and feeling like your lungs are about to collapse. When I was smoking I chose swimming as my preferred exercise, as it was the only sport that didn’t make me feel like I was gasping for air, unless I was underwater of course. The more sport I did, the less I smoked, and the less I smoked the more energy I had. A great surge of positive momentum began to take over my life, and with all this newfound energy I was able to accomplish more and felt happier. Sport was reducing my stress levels and helping me to reduce the amount I smoked.

Outcast

Certain other things began to change too. It wasn’t until I had stopped smoking altogether I realised I was the only one sitting at the dinner table, whereas the rest of my friends socialised whilst puffing away outside. I felt like the outcast, and my fingers itched slightly with the desire to wrap themselves around the stub of a cigarette.

In Europe it is socially acceptable to smoke, and most people do without feeling any judgment. Bloomberg News reported that Europeans are the highest consumers of cigarettes (and additionally alcohol) from a study made by the World Health Organisation.

Cultural or health factor?

In Australia, my home of origin, it is frowned upon and brought up consciously as a subject of public health. In Australia the smoker would be the one outside, and the rest all still sitting at the dinner table.

Which makes me wonder: is smoking a cultural or a health issue? I know many people who both smoke and participate in all sorts of sports and activities and it does not seem to affect their performance ability.

According to the New York Times, the number of adults who smoke has dropped to a record low of 18.9 % in the US last year. Health however may not have something do with it. The global cost increase of cigarettes brands, health risk packaging and smoking bans have made it an obstacle for the consumer to incorporate it into their everyday life and budget. Fewer people smoke because it is more expensive, and because it is becoming less socially acceptable to be a smoker.

Go electronic?

I don’t think anyone smokes because they think it’s healthy for them, but what if you want to be healthier?

There are many alternatives, and one increasing trend is electronic cigarettes. Throughout Europe there is a building trend for stores supplying a range of styles. The battery operated E-cigarette contains liquid nicotine that is heated up by an atomizer. This creates a vapour cloud that is inhaled and exhaled by the user, creating the illusion that they are smoking an everyday cigarette.  Thus unlike conventional cigarettes the electronic cigarette does not require the same dangerous mix of chemicals to keep the tobacco and paper burning.

Some specialists say although it does mean that electronic cigarettes are safer, they contain similar carcinogenic chemicals that cause various forms of cancer. They may be ‘healthier’ than standard cigarettes but they are not ‘healthy’, even if they are Jack Nicholson’s new brand of choice.

So why do we smoke?

Why would we stop?

Why did we start in the first place?

Can we smoke and still expect to be healthy?

This generally accepted social norm that helps us with stress, which can equally connect or isolate us from others, is undeniably detrimental to our personal health.

Stress relief

We know that cigarettes are full of nasty chemicals, and obviously nicotine is what gets everyone hooked, but I have a different theory:

the act of smoking is merely breathing in and out. Think of every time you’re stressed and you let out a gust of frustrated breath, you feel just a little better after. Smoking is a greater manifestation of that, where you perform controlled breathing, the same as you might in a yoga class. This enhances and relaxes you, allowing you to clear your mind so to speak; why else would we need to get some fresh air from time to time, when maybe all we mean is that we are just going for a cigarette.

When I left the gym feeling oh so fantastic and proud of myself for getting back into doing sport, I also saw my personal trainer smoking on the street. My western sensibilities were shocked, but my European attitude didn’t mind at all. Whether it is a health issue or a cultural issue, one thing is certain. Smoking shall always remain a hot topic.

By Kalpana Barnao

TOP FIVE QUIT TIPS

1. Don’t smoke in the morning, it gives your body a chance to get more oxygen and thus give you more energy.
2. Collect your empty packets. See how many you have at the end of the week to see how much you actually smoke.
3. Eat carrots! The crunchiness of the carrot helps relieve tension in your facial muscles and your jaw caused by stress.
4. Do meditative exercise like swimming or yoga. Sports that rely on rhythmic breathing can encourage you to be more aware of your fitness and reduce stress levels.
5. BE DISCIPLINED! Find more healthier ways to de-stress or cope with situations. The confidence you  develop will help you to not rely on cigarettes and build greater self-esteem.

QUIT SMOKING APPS

A bumpy landing with Awesome feedback!

Previously we posted about ‘Project AddApp in the making’. Now we have  lift off!  So what has happened since then?  A lot!  Let’s look at it step by step, and talk about our ‘bumpy landing’ experience…

BUMPY LANDING:

We work with the lean startup methodology, or at least we try to, and one of its principles is the so called Minimum Viable Product, or more simply MVP.  An MVP is normally a dirty product which you launch as quickly as possible to test your assumptions and validate them (or not) and then pivot to make improvements and/or other changes.  So that’s what our first product was – a dirty web application.  There is a quote saying that “if you are not ashamed of your first product, you launched too late”.  I guess we launched very fast because we were very much ashamed.  Why?  Well where do I start…

….We had bugs all over the place, the Withings integration was not ready yet, we were not getting all info we needed from Fitbit, many experiments were locked even if users had enough data to run them, the interface with Fatsecret was underperforming, the experiment graph was showing the Y axis upside down,  if you zoomed in & out of the graph you were seeing dots changing places, the trend line on the graph did not make any sense on a scattered plot graph with scattered data, the snapshots on the dashboard were wrong, users would not be able to understand the graph (even when it was correct), the flow of the sign up process was made with too many clicks,  a user was concerned about privacy because we were mentioning that we can post on his/her behalf on social media (although we never intended to do this) and many many more…

We could continue with this list but the lesson is what was important:  WE GOT FEEDBACK VERY FAST which validated one of the most crucial assumptions we had;  that users would be interested to create experiments and get back feedback via correlations.  It might seem a simple common sense assumption but we can tell you it is not.  Moreover, we got very constructive feedback on the initial concept, on the apps we should integrate further, and also some hints of what users would pay for.  Whatever product you create it has to be sustainable not just in terms of the growth of users, but also in terms of money – growth is not always equal to money.  So the sooner you ask users what they would pay for the better!

What did we do with all this feedback? WE PUT IT TO WORK.  There will be more on this in the next blog update, so come back soon!

THANK YOU

We would like to thank specific users for their feedback.  We think of these people more as collaborators rather than users.  Many thanks to Lisette (make sure you check her work on collaborative communities), Stuart (make sure you check the Human Memome Project), Martin, and Bill.  Thank you so much!

Throughout the past months we also were contacted and spoke with some truly awesome people building various devices and platforms.  So make sure you check out Andrei Pop from HumanAPI, Anthony Pelosi from Magellan Fitness, and Panu Keski-Pukkila from Caktus. They are all working hard to make some outstanding products that you should give a try.

Project AddApp in the making Part III – we have a lift off!

We have a lift off!  We launched our prototype last week.  We first communicated our launch to the people who supported us by signing up to our basic launch page.  It is the least we could do for them.  Signing up for a product that does not exist is a big leap of faith.  So we are grateful to them!

WERE WE READY???

When we launched we were NOT ready.  There were bugs we knew of and bugs we didn’t know of.  For the ones we knew of we could wait till the perfect moment.  We didn’t and we did so intentionally.  We recently read a quote saying “People wait all week for the weekend, all year for the summer, and all their lives for happiness”.  If we make an “interpretation” twist regarding our launch to this quote, we could wait forever till everything was presumably perfect.  Perfection should always be the target but you have to be aware that it is only a dream.  So we decided to bullet proof our prototype as much as possible and launch pretty much just like the dog below…

SO WHAT IS THE OFFER, THE FEATURES, THE SERVICE???

Just because it is free, it does not mean people will use it.  We believe our offer has a few pretty unique and attractive features for users to explore their data.  Let’s take it one by one, though:

1.  We integrate with Runkeeper, Mapmyrun, Sleep Cycle, Fatsecret, Fitbit, Moves, and in a few days with Withings.  We plan to integrate with more health & fitness applications but for this we need YOUR feedback.  Tell us with a tweet here.

2.  A user can create an experiment.  This means she/he can choose a metric from an app she/he is using (for example, WHEN steps from Fitbit go UP) and correlate it with another metric from another app (for example, THEN calories intake from Fatsecret go DOWN).

3.  A user can create up to 5 experiments per day.

4.  Once a user creates an experiment she/he can see the strength of the experiment (10%  in this example), how many people are testing the experiment, and discuss their findings.

5.  When the user clicks on “see your stats”, she/he will see a graph with all the values regarding the 2 chosen metrics:

6.  The graph is the core of your experiment, here you can see all your data points, check their evolution by adjusting the time span analyzed, compare yourself to the average of the other AddApp-ters, discuss your experiments in the dedicated forum and share it on your social profiles.

7.  Although there is a limit on how many experiments a user can create per day (congrats if you hit this limit!), the user can test as many existing experiments as she/he wants.  The user can simply go to the “Experiments Lab”, apply filters to the existing list of experiments and press “test” on an existing experiment:

8.  In the “Dashoboard” tab the user can see the 5 experiments with the strongest correlation, the points she/he has gathered and where does she/he stand compared to the other AddApp-ters (the sum of points is the sum of all the “strengths” a user is testing), and some snapshots taken from the apps connected with Project AddApp.

9.  Last but not least, on “My profile”, our users can also export their data in CSV format.  We are crystal clear on the fact that all those data are your property!

This our “free” offer.  We are in the process of validating the premium features we have in mind but we cannot do that, and we will not do that, without feedback!  So, we count on the users telling us what they like, what they don’t like, what would they pay for, and to which direction should we turn our time & effort to.  We have assumptions but that’s what they are: “assumptions”.

If you want to connect with us, give us suggestions, and speak with us, we will be happy to hear from you!  Tell us via Twitter and facebook!

Now let’s experiment!

Kouris & Mauro

Email(required)

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

Project AddApp in the making Part II

As promised from the previous post, we will give you updates as we are preparing ourselves for the launch.  We are very close to launching our Minimum Viable Product (MVP).  To be specific about it we want to launch on the 15th of July 2013.  So many things have to be taken care of till we launch even for an MVP.  Namely:

1.  Integrate third-party applications:  Which one to choose?

We will be pulling in data from 7 applications/tracking devices.  These are Fitbit, Withings, Runkeeper, Sleep Cycle, Moves, Mapmyrun, and Fatsecret.  You might ask “why these?”  It is a combination of 3 factors.  First its popularity.  It was surprising to us that it is not that easy to find the most popular applications.  What is popular really?  The app market in general is so dynamic that things change very quickly and you can rely only on “guesstimates”.  Second, open/closed API.  In our opinion, the best apps are the ones which allow integration.  There is a whole discussion about why a company should or should not allow this.  Our viewpoint is that isolating yourself in the world of big data can bring less benefits than opening up.  Or if you want to turn it around, it will do you less harm.  Third, even when there is an open API there are differences in the amount of work needed to integrate it.  You can make the following translation:  more amount of work=more money to spend.  Having those factors in mind we made our choice.  As we go forward we will be adding more health & fitness applications.  You wanna have your say on what to integrate next?  Tweet it @projectaddapp!

2.  Design:  Not bad or good enough?

Although we like our first design, it is not something Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Chief Software Designer, would have created.  We did this because we want a minimalist design.  We want it to be simple & functional.  Nevertheless, there are things to take care of.  For example, the blank states.  We were busy thinking of the user experience but we actually forgot how it would look like if a user had just signed up without having connected anything.  This and other small things like last minute changes on the colors, on pop-up windows, and other have to be tackled.

3.  Launching strategy:  Where are the users and how do you get feedback?

We are launching an MVP.  We don’t go for the solution of a private BETA because we don’t see the benefit in our case.  We are ready to handle a big amount of users, if the tech gods are with us, and we want three things:  feedback, feedback, feedback.  The more users we have, the more feedback we can get.  We have plans for the future but why spend money now for it?  We want our users to let us know if our ideas are crap or have an added value.  In terms of attracting signups on our launch page, we have multiple ways of doing it:  slideshare presentations from our own experiences, engaging in forums and social media, blog posts like this one, and we did spend a few euros on paid ads.

4.  Alignment:  Who is the one with the broken compass?

We are a team of 2 but we have outsourced the programming, the design, and the algorithm creation.  All these are different parts of the same puzzle and they have to fit!  So we have to spend a lot of time coordinating, translating communications & understandings and trying to keep everyone on the same boat towards the same destination with the right speed.  It is not easy.

5.  What can go wrong?

This is a question somebody should ask in every industry, in every company, for every product.  It is not that you can tackle everything on one go but it is better to know upfront rather than being confronted with it at the last moment.  Or, in other words, there are things you know you know, there are things you know you don’t know, and there are things you don’t know you don’t know.  Minimizing the 3rd one will be of added value, no doubt about it.

Apart from all the five above points you have to keep yourself motivated, healthy (using health & fitness apps), focused and up to date.  The wearable technology explosion, and the related health & fitness apps around it, can make or break your day if you are running a start-up using all these health & fitness data.  But what can be more fascinating than waking up and knowing that you will hear & see something new?

Stay put, follow us, sign up!  We will keep you updated on the road towards our launch.

Kouris & Mauro

Project AddApp in the making Part I

Project AddApp is a startup based in Brussels, Belgium.  Brussels is one of these cities where the startup world runs somewhat parallel to the vibe of the whole city, which is primarily driven by the European Union Institutions, consulting companies and lobbyists.  Check Betagroup if you want to know more.

What is Project AddApp?

We are a platform where we pull in data from health & fitness applications & tracking devices and provide insights to the users about their data.  If you know the term “quantified self” you probably heard similar services/startups before.  We will not argue on that one, actually the more the better if you ask us.  There is so much to be done and the quantified self space is growing like a snowball.

We will soon launch our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and we will to let users explore & discover insights coming from their data.  We will launch a web application instead of a native application on iOS or Android.  We did this, exactly because we believe in mobile applications when it comes to tracking yourself.  Considering the fact that we do have a budget, we assessed that for our MVP building a web application (accessible via mobile) is better to get a first feedback.  Once we are sure that we have enough feedback to go forward with, we will build our native application.

Our product is based on the assumption that collectively we know more about ourselves than in isolation.  You probably know your personal data from your tracking experience.  You probably have a hard time analyzing these data.  Project AddApp will give you the possibility to know more by letting you, for example, explore how the carbs you consumed for lunch impacts your sleep quality.  Nevertheless, assuming you could easily find this out, where do the others stand?  Do they have the same experience as you do?  This is something additional we will offer with our MVP.  How will we do that?  More on that soon on a separate blog post which will be posted some days before our launch.  So make sure you follow our blog.

Who is Project AddApp?

We are two “wannabes” entrepreneurs (Kouris & Mauro) but we are not that, just yet.  We are both not technical.  Therefore we are not the typical duet you find in startups where one codes and the other designs.  Is this scary?  It can be, if you allow it.  If you can code your own software you generally have more possibilities to drive it to wherever you want it to go.  You can code the whole night if needed.  We have to outsource it and this means ensuring that our programming partner has to have a very good idea of our concept & vision.  Moreover, we have to give directions to our outsourcing partners ensuring that we stay within the budget, within deadlines, and be able to anticipate of situations which we never encountered before, and we don’t know when they will appear.

“Iron” Kouris has an educational background in international economics and international relations.  He has worked in consulting, merger & acquisition, project management, and supply chain.  He likes structure and he has seen too many times the movie “Ironman”…

“Super” Mauro has an educational background in business administration & international management.  He has worked in human resources, finance, supply chain, and lately project management.  He is the creative type and he plays too much the game “Super Mario”…

We will be posting more info about us & screenshots of our first frontend designs as we go forward.  Interested?  Sign up here, add our blog to your RSS reader, and follow us on Twitter!

Project AddApp

Follow Kouris

Follow Mauro

Fitbit One vs Nike+Fuelband vs Moves

In the past 7 months I have become a quantified self enthusiast and I have been using a number of tracking devices & smartphone applications to monitor my body & behavior.  It has been a great experience to bring on the surface personal health & fitness elements which otherwise go unnoticed in the general blindness of “common sense”.

In this post I want to share my conclusions (see also slideshare presentation) from running a short experiment comparing data coming from Fibit (specifically Fitbit One), the Nike+Fuelband bracelet, and the smartphone application “Moves”.  My main driver in running this experiment is to find which application measures more accurately the steps I take per day, but also what does this mean for the calories I burn.

To do this experiment I followed the simple rule of having both tracking devices and my iPhone (for the Moves application) always with me.  Simply put, if I didn’t use one, I didn’t use the other.  This was more difficult with the iPhone device as sometimes I forgot my phone on the desk for short period of times.  That’s why I focus more on the comparison between Fitbit One and the Nike+Fuelband.  Nevertheless I saw value including the Moves application data anyway.

I find two main conclusions from this experiment:

1. 1.  Fitbit One counts more steps than the Nike+Fuelband bracelet.

I am not a technical expert and I cannot argue about the technical differences between the accelerometers used from Fitbit One and the Nike+Fuelband bracelet.  I do see, though, that the Nike+Fuelband bracelet and the Moves application come close to each other.  In a recent post by Gary Wolf comparing the Nike+Fuelband bracelet with the Fitbit he argued that “the FuelBand reliably captures intentional steps, which it interprets as exercise. The FitBit gets these, but also registers more ambiguous movements, which in its framework count as activity. The Fuelband is made by a fitness company. The FitBit is for general lifestyle use”.  So I believe the Nike+Felband bracelet is more accurate.  I believe that a tracking device should count actual steps rather than counting steps coming from ambiguous movements.

1. 2.  Fitbit One calorie calculation indicates that I burn significantly more calories than the Nike+Fuelband bracelet.

There is a big difference between the two tracking devices on calories burned.  For example, on April 30, 2013 Fibit One indicates that I burned 1 calorie for every 2.9 steps I made, while the Nike+Fuelband bracelet indicates that I burned 1 calorie for every 6.8 steps.  Again, I cannot argue here with certainty which device is more accurate but I would allow a guess and that is Nike+Fuelband.  If this is true, though, then it is bad news for people who connect their Fitbit data with Myfitnesspal.  This is because whoever has a daily calorie goal consumption in myfitnesspal will find themselves getting more calories allowed to consume because Fitbit indicates that you burn more than you probably actually do…this is still, though, an assumption.

As a closing note, I believe that there is value in both tracking devices because they both serve the goal of making you aware or alert on how much you are moving.  What is really important is the trend.

Kouris

Co-Founder@projectaddapp