Gadgetory

welcome to top shelf my name is David Pearson this week we're talking about self knowledge all the things we know about ourselves and it turns out there's a lot more than there used to be thanks to our phones and apps and weird devices throughout our house the question is do we want to know all this data and if we do what do we do with it all so before we get too far let's start with what we know now if you were committed to it it's always been possible to track your life you could count how many laps you ran around the track how many sets you did on the bench press or how much you weigh but now that there's a smart phone in your pocket and companies can build a computer smaller than your thumbnail there's almost nothing you can't track most people still track what they always did steps calories and wait but the same devices that give you that information now give you much more you can track your sleep not only how much of it you got but how much as it was deep sleep and how much was restless and how many times you woke up during a night you can track your eating habits both what you're eating and what it's doing to you as well as how fast you're either are you chewing enough there's actually a gadget that will tell you there are also gadgets and apps that will tell you how you're spending your time whether or not you're getting a work done and whether or not you're meditating ever wondered about your amino acids now you can know more about them than you ever dreamed or probably want it most of that other near amino acids I guess it's just an easier way to track data you could have theoretically figured out before but it gets crazier you can track when you last bleeps how long your poops last and what it all says about your eating habits speaking of which you can figure out if you're technically eating too much just by using an iphone app it says your stomach is stretching if you're overfeeding yourself which is terrifying you can even take a picture of a food and figure out how many calories it has so you won't stretch your stomach too much if you're particularly clinical there are devices for tracking your heartbeat and your blood pressure some track your surroundings in your moods too so you can figure out that warm humid rooms make you sleepy and cold rooms make you mad some will even change the temperature once they learn how you feel you can chart your mood against your diet too and I bet you'll learn a lot about what makes you happy and what doesn't the list really goes on and on want to know how much time you waste on Facebook down to the millisecond there's an app for that want to take a picture of your surroundings every 30 seconds so you never forget anything you ever did ever check wondering when you last and how it was all you have to do is download an app combine it with one of the food crackers and you'll probably figure out why it was or wasn't very good all this data collection is becoming more and more automatic just strap a thing to your wrist or stick it in your pocket and forget about it but for now though there's still a lot you have to input yourself and that's kind of a lot of work so the big question the next question all these companies and manufacturers have to answer is what am I supposed to do with all this data I know how much I weigh I know how much I mean I know how good my sex is I know how good my poops are so what so there's a lot of questions left and here to answer all of them is Danberg our reviews editor who you're kind of into this stuff right I've a minimally I i got the fitbit zip which is like the most basic tracker you can possibly do because this little guy yeah let's look at that one and you you clip it that's like that goes on your butt don't you lose these I've lost all of the ones that I have tried by see if I find him six weeks later I'm like well this is useful to me yeah if I slip it in my pocket or something it will fall out but I just keep it clipped to my belt and all this one does is pretty much measure steps and so it's basically like a glorified pedometer you know and you can have the app and you can see all the different stuff but it doesn't do as much as all of these other things so what why that one that like what does that do for you well i tried the up and the the job went up and basically like I just never remembered to like turn it on to the sleep mode and like they're you you're motivated for like a week or two weeks so then all of a sudden it just kind of fades and the information like is in the background so what I want is something that like I don't have to think about and it just is there and then I can view the information when I want to and then it's there yes that's the real question right is what how do we make it so that much more than just steps is tracked automatically and sort of collated for you and stuff is done with it and so you've done it you've looked into some of the ways people are trying to do this so what you found like our people working on this they're they're trying to the the real quest like you are saying is to get the most amount of data from the least amount of user action right and it's interesting how different people are approaching it like the FuelBand the Nike Fuel band is awesome because you wear it and it abstracts things it's way too yeah it's pretty and you don't ever have to think about it it's not like you're tracking your steps and your sleep like it just gives you a number that it's like okay do I hit that number or not right that's the thing I like about this is it's totally like abstract yes all you're doing is better but that sort of defeats the purpose of having all these cool sensors and data and stuff right i don't know but so but with all the all the rest of this stuff people are trying to do sort of more aggressive things than nike nike seems to have just admitted that they can't do it yeah i can even try yeah but there's like the Fitbit flex here collects a ton of data mm-hmm but what's like how what do I do with it what are people doing with this data I mean that's up to the users right now the the manufacturers are only able to like present it and try to like visualize it and they give you charts and graphs and you can kind of see and correlate different moods or activities of different steps and feelings and stuff and the actual meeting is up to the user I guess there's no real like this is good and this is bad but isn't that isn't that like broken sort of fundamentally where you're you're making me do all of this extra work myself and it's like you said getting the most data from the least user interaction and there's like jawbone is doing some some interesting stuff with this yeah right what's there what's there well their land they're trying to track in the mood and like how you're feeling versus your activities right so that's really interesting why things is also doing something really interesting they've got the pulse here and this even has like little fingerprint thing on the back so you can take your heart rate interesting and their app is kind of unique because they really focus on your overall wellness and health they're like okay well these are four quadrants it's like activity and it's sleep and its weight and like all these things and they're trying to be overall healthy and the pulse fits into it their weight tracker fits into it you can use like a bunch of other kind of apps and services to link and do it to kind of get this as well small to it it was just cool well so okay so those other apps and services or what I'm really curious about so this does sort of one thing for me right and with things makes other things with things or why things I don't even know but they do other things to where they have the scale yeah that matches with this too but isn't the dream to sort of make all of this work together where I can wear this I where the that wacky headband when I'm sleeping I wear something else I'm you know just living my everyday life or when I lose this is that ever going to happen are we just totally segmented and screwed here I think we're going to get there the the Whiting's are the withing uh they're the closest their API is open so you can kind of connect to it and kind of use the data and their app can connect to like the Zeo headband it connects to RunKeeper to track your runs it connects to like all these different services to like track your food and everything else and they're kind of bringing it all together but their implementation is more okay here's your steps and view your step activity and here is your food view your food activity rather than by day which is what all the other apps are doing so kind of segmenting it out they kind of lose the daily history that you get the value from all the other apps okay but so we have all this other data now right and even outside of sort of the the fitness stuff there's all kinds of other stuff were able to track yeah um and you you're telling me before about this guy who took video of his kid and was able to figure out sort of like a lot of scientific discoveries about his son or daughter just by having all this data yeah that he recorded his child I forget like from like birth to two or five he ended up collecting like 90,000 hours worth of video like had a camera on his kid at all times you know he put it in his house so like in every single individual room like nine different rooms different cameras and collected audio and video throughout this and then he went through was able to analyze it and what he was looking for was the evolution of language so how does a person learn how to talk based on their interactions with people their interactions with objects and kind of the the way people actually learn and think based on their interactions and it was really interesting and he kind of took that experience and related to okay the dissemination of information were like a presidential speech and everybody watching it what's being absorbed what's being learned and how does that kind of shape society as a whole so he's able to watch you know what's being said to his child and how that sort of comes back out of his child then or later or whatever exactly and that's just a big data play that he pulls together but so then does he have to go through 90 thousand hours of video to try and put all this together yes that sounds awful yeah it's it's tear it was like 200 terabytes of data so yeah there there needs to be like an easier way to kind of bring a meaning to this because that's meaningful like understanding how language and learning and information works is meaningful but going through 90 thousand hours of one person to get it is not anything like anybody can do so what's going to take is it going to be one company that's gonna have to just sort of take over the ecosystem and hopefully make everything that we need for everybody or are there is it going to be like a back-end that does it all or what's how do you see this going what's going to happen here first I think there's going to be one company that's going to do a lot of things they're going to do it really well after that I can see it kind of opening up as other people are like okay here's how to do it really well and then having like one big back-end so like people can have their own system or server just like you have your own email box or something you can collect information from everywhere and make meaning of it or whatever is meaningful to you right yeah I mean that would be that seems like the dream right as you can have all your different devices and then they you know they're sort of the dots and then there's something living in the background just connecting them all yeah and is that I guess just a matter of them all these companies Fitbit and weddings and Nike and all them just working together and sort of owning the fact that you know more data is better yeah that I mean working together or opening up so that other people can get in there more but it's also up to people to figure out what the actual meaning that is important like if I'm tracking my steps that I'm not going to learn about the evolution of language like it's finding out okay why is that step count important and it's interesting to me because I can see okay well I'm not really getting as many steps as I should be I'm gonna start taking a walk in the morning or do something like actionable just because I like getting up to the ten thousand daily recommended steps but beyond that it's not too much meaning yet I guess and in order to get like the meaning like the sleep the food that you're eating that that takes a lot more work and there needs to be a way to not do the work because I forget and people forget like if you forget for two days you go back and you have an incomplete history your motivation to keep going just decreases each time well and all your data becomes sort of exactly messed up right exactly okay so the one place I think we've gotten this right in a lot of ways and that makes me excited for the rest of its running this is like the big thing that people are into yeah and so basically is did we strap all of these things onto you I think that's what happened every single one of the sweetie all of these and more on to Dan we send him running and we want to figure out how accurate is this data how good is it how interesting is it and basically how sweaty can we make Dan on camera the current trend in Fitness says the more data that you have the more fit you'll be so we took eight different devices and apps from eight different manufacturers who are subjecting them to the same run down the West Side Highway here in New York City we're going to let you know what we liked what we did I ran a total of 1.5 seven miles in an average pace of 10 minutes and 10 seconds per mile somewhat surprisingly all of the different apps and devices counted pretty much the same number of steps the s4 is walking mate was the lowest they counted only 2526 steps the jawbone up was next which is 2535 steps the Whiting's Polson counted 2539 steps the fitbit zip was 2540 steps and the fitbit flex was 2546 steps in total the run earned me 590 fuel points on the nike+ fuelband which is about a fifth of the activity that's recommended for the average active day anything that was strapped to my arm became uncomfortable as I was running and keeping things like pocket just kind of moved around and weren't really secure all the devices that i was using with the exception of the runkeeper were designed to give an overall sense of the daily activity level the runkeeper app on my iphone was the only product that is not designed for constant all day use and thus provided the best information while I was running including distance pace and time the only problem was I couldn't really see it when it was strapped to my arm and I didn't want to hold it or put it in my pocket I was able to slide bracelets like the Fitbit flex the jawbone up and the nike+ fuelband higher up on my wrist they wouldn't move around I ran but over time they kind of became sweaty underneath and it was uncomfortable although not unbearable the clip-on trackers like the Fitbit flex and the Whiting's pulse width at least noticeable but I lost the Whiting's pulse on a previous run after incorrectly returning it to the clip so I was constantly paranoid that it was going to fall out again I liked all the information that was provided by the runkeeper app but I wish that there was some way to view it on my wrist because that would be much easier to see while I was running my ideal product still isn't out there but I'm gonna keep looking that's our show thanks so much for watching thanks to Danberg for being here and a very special thanks to the good people of the West Side Highway we'll be back next Monday and every Monday we'll see you that