Here’s the presentation I gave at the Quantified Self meeting at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto this week. Sixty smart and passionate people on the frontier of personal life and health monitoring technology joined the discussion about using lifestream data to improve memory and cognition, enhance self-awareness, and understand health. Some attendees were researchers trying to discover signals in lifestream data, starting with their own. Some were developers and investors in health and behavioral monitoring companies. Some were from Google. Some were simply curious.
One presenter from Fujitsu demonstrated his around-the-clock blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen monitoring results in an effort to understand which medications influenced his sleep apnea. Esther Dyson showed her 23andMe genetic profile and compared it to her family members and colleagues, while another researcher showed the challenges of posting his genome on Twitter. (Hint: at 140 characters per Tweet and 1000 Tweets per day, it takes two years and you have a high risk of being flagged as a spammer.) Others logged symptoms and environmental factors related to medical issues, analyzed language to passively capture information and insights on mental health, while one person showed his 10 year mind map.
The common denominators at the Quantified Self meeting were that everyone was interested in taking notes on their life experience in a quantifiable way in order to better understand their own experience and to solve problems. In each case, the limiting factor seemed to be the ability and persistence to take notes that could be converted into something useful. It’s just too much darned work.
Simplicity is the key to any kind of self-monitoring and information capture, because no one needs a bunch of extra work. I learned the strength of simplicity working in the field of personal health monitoring for many years as the founder and former CEO of Health Hero Network, the developer of the Health Buddy System, a pioneering effort of electronic “lifestreaming” to improve chronic care.
Initiated over 10 years ago, Health Buddy started as a rather limited pre-scripted four-button survey system to collect symptoms from patients while providing education and motivation on following a treatment plan. Despite its simplicity and limitations (or more likely, because of them), Health Buddy was tremendously successful in positively influencing health behavior and in reducing health complications for complex conditions ranging from diabetes and heart disease to mental health and obesity. Tens of thousands of patients are using Health Buddy daily. The Medicare project that we spent years in winning and implementing is showing great results where many others have failed. The company is now Robert Bosch Healthcare.
Earlier this year, my new company, 3banana Inc., introduced note-taking applications for iPhone and Android smartphones that offered the ability to sync with a free online notebook and share with social networks like Twitter and Facebook. My interest in Quantifed Self is to learn, share and discuss ideas about how to use smartphones to enhance our working memory and augment our brains by capturing information and connecting to useful services that can help us achieve our goals — and to do so with less work.
Can we shape our brains around mobile technologies to expand our working memory in much the same way we do in developing software? In developing software for mobile devices where memory resources are more limited, we don’t store all of the content in short term memory. Instead, we store the links to where we know we can find the rest of the information when needed, wherever it might be on the network. The same can work for our brains. Once we have a trusted memory accessory where we can easily park and retrieve notes, we can free up both short term and long term working memory.
The key to capturing information is simplicity, which is why 3banana Notes is freeform and unstructured. Who needs the work of thinking up titles and categories when you want to jot down a thought? Instead, structure can emerge from inline hashtags (the ubiquitous # sign that gives semantics to Twitter) and from context awareness: Knowing where you were and what you were doing when you took the note can improve pattern matching services that add value to your notes by appending useful information and filling in the blanks. On our Android smartphone app, for example, addresses within notes automatically turn into links to Google maps, and phone numbers automatically link to dialing a call.
The other way that 3banana on Android works to enhance your working memory is to enable you to store links to your content directly on physical objects by generating and scanning your own personalized two dimensional barcodes, or QR Codes. We have brain maps dedicated to the physical objects we find around us every day, and these objects can be powerful cues to recalling the information and actions associated with those objects if we can link to them in context. Simple examples include putting a QR Code on your furnace that you can scan with your phone to recall the logbook about changing the filters, or putting a QR code linking to your music practice chart or exercise log on the music stand or on the exercise bike.
At Quantified Self, I showed the example of scanning bottle of wine with a smartphone to access shared wine notes and wine tasting discussions with friends. Remembering bottles of wine is one of those “note to self” categories that always got lost until I started connecting it to my digital world. Now I can quickly snap a photo into my #wine notes, share with people who like wine, or post to social media sites Twitter and Facebook, using Twitter’s OAuth and Facebook Connect for one-click integration. Perhaps a wine distributor or retailer will want to use 3banana to tag expensive bottles wine so that each sale becomes a potential viral marketing channel leading to new customers and increasing the loyalty of existing customers.
Finally, we know from brain research that emotion is the most powerful trigger in the brain to put something in long term storage — to remember something rather than to forget it. That’s great when we need to remember something for survival, like how to get away from the lions and bears, but it doesn’t serve us well for all the non-life threatening content we might want to remember for business and personal interests. Just as teaching is the best way to learn something, I have found that writing, sharing, and discussing new ideas with real people is the best way to remember something. Sharing with other people using social media connects that information to our brain maps associated with people, and relationships are loaded with emotional content.
In the world of the brain, three is a magic number because we can remember and work with things in threes better than any other number. 3banana has three meanings: In the geeky world of code monkeys, 3banana describes those smart, flexible, fast learners adept with new technology. In the world Twitter and jotting down notes, 3banana is a unit of time that represents the minimum latency to capture and absorb an idea. And if you are looking at three bananas on your kitchen table, you probably know that bananas are brain food. Bananas are rich in potassium, which helps the brain transmit messages. But bananas don’t last long sitting around, so if you are looking at three, better share one.
Our mission at 3banana is to create tools that enhance your working memory and augment your brain. In addition to taking notes, we will keep enhancing these tools to become more and more useful in those areas of your life that you want to improve, both personally and for the planet. Give it a shot and let us know what you think.
In 1853 when Giuseppe Donati invented the classical wind instrument he called the “ocarina” in his workshop in the village of Budrio, Italy, people tended to know the daily activities of their neighbors. When someone in your neighborhood played the ocarina in his or her home late at night, not only could you hear it, but you also might have recognized the player and the tune. Maybe you would join in on your own instrument.