The body works amazingly well when taken care of and listened too. Really. Instead of hyper tracking every aspect of your life [and making assumptions based on that data] Just exercise, eat well, no caffeine, minimal sugar/food after dark, get 10+min of sun around noon, go to sleep when tired. All of which is almost impossible for 90% of people who are forced into regimented, high stress, excessive work lives.
While I agree with the sentiment here, the actual mechanics just don't hold true for plenty of people. Certainly the 80/20 rule probably applies: your suggestions will fix a great many issues for many people, and it's definitely worth reminding most people to make several of the changes you suggest -- particularly exercise and sleep.
But if the recipe was really that simple for all people, more of us would experience more success.
Humans are complex. Not mechanistically complex, stochastically. We're chaotic. One set of inputs may produce different outputs, and reverse-engineering the reasons for those differences may be "hard" or impossible. Apps and tracking devices can help reveal small areas where a fractional improvement in control or quality can have very large beneficial effects.
Lifestyles and other highly personal factors mean that the application of a simple single formula will be met with varying success. And anyway, you have to measure the outcomes to understand how successful the intervention has been.
I'd also point out that just because you feel well, it doesn't mean that your lifestyle or body (or mind) are healthy. Some attempt at objective data is useful to determine if you're really as healthy as you think you are. Sure, you may feel great if you get regular sleep every night. But did you know your sleep apnea puts you at increased risk of cardiovascular disease?
Edit: probably a better example... You may feel perfectly fine sitting down for several hours per day. But you're at increased risk of a whole range of diseases. A timer set to beep evey 20 minutes to remind you to get up and move may actually add years to your life.
This isn't a defence of lifestyle or health/fitness apps and so on, just a recognition that they work for some people, and for some circumstances. Or so it appears. This is the start of a vast, poorly coordinated longitudinal experiment. We'll be poring over the data for years yet.
This is, sadly, advice which gets ignored by an overwhelming number of people in our industry. I know so many otherwise smart folks who buy a FitBit and track their caloric intake only to then drive (not go outside and walk) 2 blocks to get lunch at McDonalds or someplace similar. You don't need a product/app to live a healthy lifestyle... most likely if you are trying to solve a health/lifestyle problem by purchasing something, that is just symptomatic of yet another unhealthy aspect of your lifestyle.
> You don't need a product/app to live a healthy lifestyle
You don't if you live within constraints which are healthy. Many people do not, because of their job, or because of the way their physical environment is set up - for instance, you may stand in a shop for 8 hours a day, and develop problems with your legs. The sensible thing to do is not to stand for 8 hours a day, but the reason why you may have done that before is because that is the expected, default behaviour. To change that so you are moving around enough not to cause damage requires deliberate and ongoing intervention, and something that tracks movement can certainly help with that. Likewise if you develop health problems from sitting for 8 hours a day.
> most likely if you are trying to solve a health/lifestyle problem by purchasing something, that is just symptomatic of yet another unhealthy aspect of your lifestyle
Tell that to the thirty pounds I've lost, over the last couple months, by dint of using a Basis band to track calories out, and logging what I eat to do the same for calories in.
Not and have any idea how close I am to my target deficit; I'd either err low and fail to lose the weight, or err high
and badly endanger my health via malnutrition. With the band, I know exactly where I'm coming in on a daily basis, and I can, for example, plot calorie deficit over delta-weight and see where I should be aiming for best effect.
In general, I'm surprised to see such a Luddite attitude espoused on HN. What kind of engineer doesn't see the value in collecting the necessary data to characterize a
problem or a process accurately? That's Step One.
Yeah, I love to collect data on my running, for example. But my point is I'd (and probably you would also) be doing it anyway, with or without the data.
The basis band you mention looks pretty cool though, going to check that out further.
I'd add in that you should avoid computer screens (or use some software like f.lux on the maximum dark setting) after the sun goes down. I'd also recommend watching your alcohol consumption in the evening as that significantly disrupts your sleep cycle.
I've found Trader Joe's "smooth and mello" decaf blend to be the only decaf blend that tastes like actual coffee. I can recommend it. I now drink about 2-4 cups of that stuff (french press brewed, and in the summer, cold-brewed overnight for iced coffee) and an espresso a day (the espresso machine at school has a caffeinated blend and I love espresso too much to stay away from it). This limits my caffeinated total to less than two cups a day (since decaf still has some non-negligible amount of caffeine).
Sugar gives you energy, makes you hyper. Energy and hyper not conductive to sleep. nightime is sleeptime. As least that is what your body expects when not amped on caffeine, sugar and other stimulants.
What affects my sleep isn't me setting my alarm for the wrong time, it's my 13 week old baby.
I'm sure I've seen a few things like this in the past. I wonder if they could adopt it for use as a baby monitor? We do currently have a sleep monitor but that just sets off an alarm if she hasn't moved in 20 seconds (or I pick her up and forget to turn the damn thing off, grrrr).
I could see this being a really useful baby monitor that:
- sets off an alarm if no movement in 20 seconds (important one this, obviously)
- lets you know if your baby is drifting off into sleep or is basically just messing about and still wide awake. Like, are you going to be able to go to bed now or should you just make a brew?
- a recording of and detailed description of sleep patterns during the night, so you've got an idea of how to organise your nights; like maybe you could work out when she's more likely to wake up at?
- a history and some kind of comparison chart, because with babies it changes all the time, so you might be able to predict and adapt in advance.
- an advance warning of when she's coming out of sleep. Babies go from slightly peckish to screaming their head off hungry in a couple of minutes, and it takes 5 minutes to warm a bottle. Having a "she's gonna need feeding soon alarm" would be really handy.
Babies need to eat/nurse frequently. We've evolved to be highly dependent on our parents until a fairly old age. The solution that worked for us was for the baby to sleep in our bed next to mom. Then this whole wake/nurse cycles basically happens without fully waking up. I realize some people are concerned about rolling on the baby but this is extremely rare/improbable for normal/healthy people. It's a somewhat controversial topic but do your own research... As a dad that had to go to work I also took some breaks and slept in another room (mom would also sleep during the day when the baby was sleeping). YMMV. Good luck and enjoy!
As for the rollover issue, many folks co-sleep with their babies. We did it with all 3 of ours. Apparently babies really really like your breath - the CO2 helps them develop their lung motion.
The key is to not be inebriated or taking sleeping meds while doing so.
There are also co-sleeper attachments that make cribs accessible to mommy without having the baby sleep on the bed and thus not ever in danger of rollover.
Dr McKenna at Notre Dame does research in this area [1].
Apparently the biggest risks (from what I recall) is the typical 'western' bed contains a lot of obstructions and places to get trapped: headboards, blankets and sheets, etc. Japan has one of the lower SIDS rates, and co-sleeping is very common there -- but beds are low to the ground, and I guess heavy bedding is uncommon.
We were very worried about SIDS when our daughter was born (11 months ago). We had all sort of monitors and sensors you can think of, only to realise with time that it was actually a source of stress for all of us.
While a gadget would be fun to help with your new-baby concerns, a bunch of your issues are simply fixed by caring for, and observing your child (aka parenting)
Also, a good deal of "training" or learning has to be done for your child to understand when it's sleep time, and when it's time to eat. Just because your baby thinks he/she is hungry, or not tired does not mean you should accommodate 100%.
It's a constant give and take. You need to care for and console an upset child, but at the same time educate them so that they are able to sleep/eat at times that benefit them overall.
Sometimes that means letting them cry in their crib, sometimes that means picking them up and rocking them back to sleep.
The kicker is eat child is different, so no gadget can help with your particular child's tendencies.
Hey wow - thanks for the awesome condescending tone! I didn't realise I had to do any parenting as you call it? Weird...I was just gonna try and gadget my way through it all.
Haha, 3 weeks here! I feel your pain. Work output on complex abstract thinking tasks has descended to terrible. It's not just the sleep, either. It's constant interruption when you do get going...
Ouch! 3 weeks was hard! Believe me I'm much happier now at 13 weeks than I was at 3.
They tell you it gets easier but it really does, honest!
I work from home so it's a constant thing. We also have a Golden Retriever who likes to run in and jump around and see what's going on when the screaming gets going just to add a little extra stress to the situation :)
Wouldn't change it, though. I know that's a cliche but it is true.
With my first child it was the constant background stress of "Oh my God I don't know what I am doing" that really threw me off. The second one was so much easier!
I know this thing is personal/individual, and different books give difference advice, but we just had our baby boy sleep with us, until he was about 8 months old (quite long, I know, and our bed is pretty small).
You really learn a lot about his patterns, movements, and you just feel him around. No need for monitors, setting things on/off, and no. We didn't suffocate him or squashed him. It was very natural to us (and him).
I can wholeheartedly recommend it to new parents, and I can honestly say I miss him around now that he sleeps in his own bed just next to ours.
Unless you sleepwalk, or are a 'flailer' there's little risk to sleeping with an infant in bed with you.
Idea for testing it out:
get a cabbage patch doll, hard boil an egg and shell it, put the egg in a clear ziplock bag, and tape the bag to doll. Check if it's squished in the morning. You may need multiple eggs on different limbs, maybe multiple eggs per bag, to account for the full size of the doll.
The problem is you would need to repeat this experiment every day for 8 months - and even then that's not enough data for a new parent to be confident. It only needs to go wrong once remember.
You're playing the odds. Some children die because they get accidentally smothered in their parent's beds. You can either take the (very small) risk that this will happen and sleep with your child in bed, or you can just not play the game at all.
And for most, I think whilst the reward is "good", the failure is just unthinkably horrific.
That's right, it's sensitive enough to pick up when she's breathing. Babies can get sleep apnea which is ok as long as it lasts no longer than 15 seconds. Longer than that and you've got problems and you need to get there straight away.
That is a cool product, but on reflection I think you're right with the monitoring. I'm not a huge fan of the monitoring system we have now, but my wife won't live without it. We even have her room only two meters away from our bedroom, but we still have an audio monitor on and turned up.
Like, 'cos when she starts crying I need to hear it in stereo ;)
Gets better. I am @ 13 months. Getting regular sleep between teeth coming in and bouts of illness.
I highly recommend eventual sleep training (interval or whatever)... just make sure you have plenty of whiskey handy... can take it's toll on your nerves.
>>> We all have a natural sleep cycle, but a normal alarm will wake you regardless. Sense’s Smart Alarm, knows the right time to wake you, so you will feel alert and refreshed.
This is the part I like best. I wrote a web application (http://sleepyti.me) designed to let people calculate their own "optimized bed times" based on when they need to get up -- in other words, doing what Sense claims to do, but in reverse. The problem, of course, is that if your dog starts barking in the middle of the night, waking you up for an hour -- or if your sleep cycle lengths are significantly different from the norm -- then the app won't work.
It's interesting to me, both because of the consistent traffic to sleepyti.me and the vast array of sleep apps and products, how neglected a good night's rest seems to be. I'm not sure if it's a cultural phenomenon or just a change in human sleep behavior, but everyone I know seems to be in a constant sleep deficit.
If you look at products like Sense, FitBit, Beddit, Sleep Cycle (app), Sleepyti.me, etc, you'll notice that the market is supporting basic human function in those that aren't generally ill. I think it's indicative of a more serious problem that we -- especially in science and technology related fields -- can't seem to make ourselves go to bed.
All of these hacks are great, and the metrics can be very useful... but in the end, nothing beats getting eight hours of sleep per night. Try it for a week or two; the difference might astound you.
So, a WiFi-attached device sitting in my bedroom with a high-sensitivity microphone, a proximity detector, and unknown software? I think I'll pass, even though the product seems cool and useful otherwise.
Sure, I've got my cellphone in my bedroom at night and it's got the mic, network connection, and unknown software. But I figure there's a much better chance of someone discovering that Google or Sprint has installed a backdoor into my phone's OS or hardware that's sending recordings illicitly than there is of someone discovering the same thing about a niche product.
If the software was open (such that I could compile and install it myself if I wanted to), and the collected data was open and available to me too, I'd be a lot more inclined to buy this. Those changes would also create the possibility of an add-on developer community that could be constantly providing new software capabilities to the device, which makes it even more compelling as a product. For example, philbarr is asking about a bunch of baby monitor features; those could all be added with software changes, I'd bet.
The first thing I look for with these products is whether there is an option for the data to stay local, or whether it is always sent directly to the cloud. I'm just not comfortable with that class of data being sent off site.
This is one reason why I'm confused by the internet of things, is the model really going to be that we have pervasive black boxes sending continuous data feeds to god knows where?
Seems like a curious place to draw the line, but to each his own. We know that law enforcement has the ability to turn smartphones into remote listening devices.
That's very different than being able to examine the source code and the data to see where everything is going. Also, though I'm not a rabid proponent of FOSS software, in this case, I would prefer to have many eyes on this code, since the authors are unknown (to me) and the data is sensitive.
This is completely ridiculous. Nobody is going to be building a backdoor into a product only a handful of people use when there are products that millions of people use that are just as easy to backdoor.
If the NSA, CIA, a foreign government, competitors, your own company, your mother, etc. wanted to listen to you and other people en masse, they're going to be backdooring a piece of software which is used by more people. A niche product like this wouldn't warrant the time necessary to bacdoor/collect data.
To my mind, the device certainly isn't some sort of serious, imminent threat, but I am sceptical because it raises philosophical objections about the direction of travel.
I grabbed a Beddit (http://www.beddit.com/) off Indiegogo, which does something similar. Compared to Fitbit (put something on; remember to start it), apps (remember to start it) and others, I was hoping it would be frictionless -- hop into bed, start collecting metrics. Unfortunately, aside from the long (long) time required to deliver a useful Android app, it's failed me in a few ways.
1. You need the app running to collect metrics from the device (so, still some friction). I forget the app all the time; at the end of the day, I drop my phone on a charger and crawl into bed. Relying on humans to actively intervene is, unfortunately, suboptimal.
2. I was hoping it'd attach to my wifi and dump metrics to an API I could query (there's no smart alarm, so attaching it to my own stack of stuff seemed cool). Unfortunately, it sends data via a private Bluetooth protocol to your phone, rather than the wifi. Intercepting this is non-trivial (although the Android Bluetooth debugging stack helps). I'm trying to build a receiver on the Pi currently.
3. The API still doesn't really exist.
My use case is slightly different from others. I've got a chronic condition, and I'm not really interested in "did I sleep well last night?", which Beddit seems to have targeted. I'm much more interested in trends over a period of time, once my illness flares -- "am I waking up more often?", "how much time am I spending in bed, rather than active?", "over the past week, how many times have I gotten up -- should I see a doctor?". This should correlate with other smart devices (scales -- "how much weight have I lost?"; fitbit -- "am I still relatively active?") to give me a more holistic view of my health. So, long-term data retention is important to me (CockroachDB looks quite neat!).
Smart alarms and overnight statistics are interesting, but I hope companies developing devices for the quantified self start to pay more attention to long-term health data. It paints a far more interesting story :).
My Basis band addresses your point 1 quite well; all I have to do is wear it to bed.
Unfortunately, there's no good API (and your choice of three variously lousy ones [1]), and it syncs in the same way as the Beddit does, i.e., via Bluetooth to a phone. (Or via USB to a computer, but that's not much more help.)
I've thought about trying to MITM the data on its way out from the PC to Basis's sync endpoint, in order to see whether I can trap it there instead of having to query it back out of one of Basis's various APIs once it's synced. On the other hand, I've already got > 1 month of data synced, so I'm going to need some method of extracting data from their backend in any case. (But on the third hand, since Intel bought Basis and Basis apparently doesn't bother much with new development any more, I figure it might be handy to have a backend for sync data in case the hardware becomes otherwise useless.)
[1] Two equally undocumented and unstable not-really-supposed-to-be-public APIs, for which various clients exist on Github in various states of disrepair, and a third, also undocumented but probably more stable, API which feeds their web UI..
So I was looking for Basis to maybe release next version of their device, then they got acquired by Intel and I was hoping it will not die horrible death, yet from your description this is what is happening.
I am using Fitbit and Basis is what I really need. I think by next year we will have something along the lines that Basis promised.
My Basis band is actually the second revision of the hardware ("Basis Carbon Steel" vs "Basis B1"). If you're thinking about buying, I definitely recommend avoiding the 1.0 version, which uses a rather bizarre custom band arrangement that apparently has a nasty habit of falling apart under heavy load; the Carbon Steel version takes a standard 26mm watch band.
And I can't really knock Basis on the hardware score; the device itself is actually quite nice, from build quality to resilience to battery life. Their web UI's not bad, too, but what I really need is an API to pull that data out and integrate it with everything else I'm logging, and it just doesn't seem like they give a damn about publishing something stable, nor as far as I can tell have they ever.
On the whole, I'm pretty equivocal. On the one hand, the Basis device is excellent, and while I can't speak to accuracy, it's quite precise. On the other, the software support isn't sufficient, and the organization doesn't give any indication of being motivated to fix that. I'm not sorry I spent $200 on a Basis band, but you might be; think it over carefully.
I got really excited about Basis! It looked to tick a _lot_ of my boxes, but I decided I'd hold out on one until there was a published API. I hadn't checked in in a while; I'm sad to hear it's still missing.
I'm fairly happy with the Beddit, but it sucks compared to the Zeo (Actimetry like WakeMate, Beddit, and now Sense is really inferior to EEG based monitoring). Sadly, Zeo went out of business, and the electrodes are consumable, so I'm stuck trying to find used ones, or find a way to make a compatible headband (anyone have advice?)
I was hoping the Melon would actually ship, but it looks non-wearable at night.
Beddit is kind of a pain because launching the app on my phone is a pain; it requires manually pairing each time.
I'd really like a network-connected, adaptive-scheduling clock next to my bed, with EEG input. Something which could wake me up early if traffic to work is bad, or let me sleep late if my flight is delayed. Ideally with a home version which does NOT use my cellphone, and a travel version which is compatible and uses my phone.
I'd be fine paying $500 for this. There is probably a market in the tens of thousands.
That was my first thought. Crunchbase shows they raised $10.5m at the end of January(1). Now they need $100k of crowdfunding to build this thing? Disingenuous at best.
Those videos have no substance... I realize in marketing that it doesn't ALWAYS make sense to layout all the details but these types of wearable/smart devices have been blowing up and the claims get more and more vague.
I get agitated watching these. I find myself saying "What does it actually do!?" throughout the whole thing. I could completely be missing the boat on this trend but things like this and the weird eyepatch that came up a while ago completely baffle me.
The money shot is the alarm that apparently knows when you should wake up.
I found the video hard to listen to. The guy has a bedside tone going on, a bit sleazy in his efforts to endorse the product with smooth caring ambience!
Integrating this with Nest would make it one of the coolest and most useful embedded electronics on the market. What if it adjusted the temperature immediately and automatically when it determined that you were cold or hot? A sensor is great. Its really cool. But a control system that reacts based on the sensor data...thats a great device with a large market
This is an idea that I hope becomes more widespread for operations folks -- optimizing what alerts to prioritize fixing based on the number that result in wakeup calls.
At the Velocity conference this year, Etsy did an amazing talk on sleep and being oncall (I can't seem to find it on youtube?). They released an open source app that links their oncall system to a sleep device (jawbone or fitbit) at https://github.com/etsy/opsweekly. Also, they had a nice graph which described how they were woken up less over the year because of this system.
Having this metric as another layer behind primary error budgets (app downtime is inversely proportional to the number of times your devs get to deploy new features) is a nice way to keep your operations staff very happy.
If you're being waken up every day by unnatural means, your body is not getting enough sleep. A few months ago I threw away my alarm clock. Now I just wake up whenever my body wants to. It's been great.
That's great if your schedule fits your sleep schedule, but I'm not sure that's very common. A product that can wake you up in time for your schedule and avoid waking you in the middle of a sleep cycle could make it easier to make due with less sleep. At the extreme of little sleep required for newborn overnight feedings, for me, three hours of sleep is significantly worse than two or four. That said, sleep cycles tend to be shorter and shallower as the night goes on, after several hours of continuous sleep, the penalty for waking up at a bad point is not that bad.
A few years ago I started waking up with the sun. Since then my waking experience has been great, I get a solid 7 every night and my day doesn't start with an abrupt bell. The sun is up, so I'm up.
Here is an interesting look at whether any of these sorts of devices actually work (in comparison to a real polysonogram): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-christopher-winter/sleep-ti.... The answer is: most of these things claim to be able to do a lot more with simple sensing techniques than they can actually do accurately.
I have no usable vision but can sometimes tell if a light is on. I don't know if light effects my sleeping though so that feature could actually be useful.
I'd like to see either an add-on which is a lamp bright enough to gradually wake you up with blue light, or for it to be able to work with things like LIFX or Phillips Hue to do the same.
I find the SleepBot app to be quite useful for a "fuzzy alarm". Simpler technology, and the app listens to you all night (kinda creepy, I agree) but the alarm works as desired.
Maybe I'm a bit paranoid but, even though afaik no proper research has found evidence of it, maybe putting a device that is constantly using wifi right next to your brain for the entire night might not be the best idea healthwise?
not to encourage OT discussion, but the song is "Avril 14th" by Aphex Twin... it sounds like the Lonely Island riffed off the main melody for "Iran So Far". The song is also the main sample in "Blame Game" by Kanye West from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Thanks for mentioning the Zeo. I used it for a month a few years ago. It was ahead of its time using 1-wire EEG monitoring. I felt the REM graph was actually telling me something. Any sleep monitor to try and take its place must be EEG based. An accelerometer is inadequate for sleep monitoring.
The closest thing I know of is the OpenBCI.com project (Brain-Computer Interface) which is entirely an EEG project.
I loved the idea of the Zeo, but as comfortable as the headband was, I never did manage to fall asleep with it on. I guess I am just super sensitive to things on my head while in bed. I ended up using the Zeo as a toy to do interesting BCI hacks with.
