Tracking my heart health

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In August I purchased a Withings blood pressure monitor. It's an inflatable arm band that connects with an iPhone and pairs with the Withings Health Mate app. It can take a reading of your systolic and diastolic blood pressure as well as your heart rate. 

So, for about the past three months I've been tracking my blood pressure and heart rate. I take three separate readings each morning and evening (so, six total).  In the two plots below, I show the results so far. The colored lines are mean values, while the gray shaded region shows the range between the minimum and maximum values (of the six values taken each day). I'm also applying a gaussian smoother (with a width of about 2 days). The plots were done using Mathematica by importing the raw data from the Withings app.

According to the American Heart Association, I'm treading into the realm of so-called prehypertension, which is pretty disconcerting. There are lifestyle changes one can make to help lower one's heart rate, like losing weight, exercising, and cutting back on alcohol intake. I've got plenty of room to improve on all three of these areas. Hopefully when I report back in three months I can show some improvement.

       

Quantified Self Chicago Meetup

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Last month I drove up to 1871 Chicago to attend my first Quantified Self meetup. The Chicago meetup group hadn't met in a while and was having a 'year-in-review' meeting to usher in the new year. The organizers, Eugene Granovsky (@euggra) and Mark Moschel (@MarkMoschel), were kind enough to let me give a short presentation on an activity tracking project I've been working on for almost two years. As is common for QS meetups, this one had a 'Show & Tell' type format, with several 15-20 minute fairly informal presentations about projects they've been working on or tools they've been using (you can find meetup photos on the group's meetup page). There were four other presenters (as far as I know, the slide decks are have not been made available).

I gave a brief summary of my work on building a tool for tracking one's daily activities down to a resolution of less than a minute. I built an iPhone app called HabStats, which is essentially a time-tracking app. There are quite a few on the app store, but I haven't found one that I consider to be 'easy to use': they typically require many gestures in order to start and stop logging. The key idea with HabStats is that you only need to tap once to switch from one activity to another. You can also create a customized ontology of activities and tags. I plan on posting more about it in the future. My plan for the new year is to try to automate the tracking using sensors, as I describe in the last couple of slides.