GigaOM » quantified-self

How big data is helping aspiring moms crack the fertility code

Ki Mae Heussner — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:32 +0000

Bringing big data into the bedroom may not sound the least bit romantic. But if you’re trying to have a baby, it could put you on a faster track to getting there.

Or at least that’s the premise behind Ovuline, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that helps women track a range of health indicators to predict the days they’re most fertile.

Even before the Quantified Self movement became a thing, healthcare providers, health sites and iPhone apps encouraged women to track signals like their basal body temperature, cervical fluid, emotions and ovulation test results to figure out when they might ovulate.

But while most apps and traditional pen and paper methods typically rely on historical cycles to pinpoint a woman’s fertile window, Ovuline says it uses machine learning to more precisely predict ovulation.

“Now, it’s all based on what happened in the past. The problem is that a lot of people have irregular cycles,” said CEO and co-founder Paris Wallace. “We’ve created the first pro-active ovulation calculator. … We’re understanding your cycle based on information you couldn’t otherwise glean yourself.”

The startup, which first debuted its app in September, said it’s been used by about 55,000 women. Now that its algorithms have learned from more than 2.5 million data points (instead of the 10,000 data points it started with), Ovuline is on Thursday taking its product of beta and launching with a more robust service.

Like plenty of other fertility-tracking apps on the market, Ovuline starts by helping women track their health indicators. But it analyzes an individual user’s data within the greater universe of its entire database and clinical guidelines to identify meaningful correlations and advise her when she’s approaching ovulation. According to the company, its service can help women get pregnant three times faster than the national average (which is four to six months).

Its newest version integrates with wearable fitness trackers like Fitbit devices (see disclosure), provides push notifications with personalized advice and lets women easily view an entire timeline of their data. If a user frequently reports feeling “stressed,” the app might send a note alerting her to the negative fertility consequences of excess levels of stress, or if she records lower than normal hours of sleep, she might receive messages on how low sleep levels can result in fertility-impeding hormones.

Enthusiastic Quantified Selfers — who carefully log and analyze their health data to uncover helpful insights — tend to be men. But using machine learning to make sense of women’s personal health data points the way to a future of data-driven medicine and shows the meaningful application of health-tracking activities that some currently see as mere naval-gazing.

Ovuline offers a free app that predicts ovulation, but premium versions (which cost up to $49.99) give women access to fertility experts and personal advice, the option to share data with partners and doctors and other features. Later this year, the company plans to roll out another application for pregnant women that similarly helps them track symptoms and lets them see how common or rare their experiences are relative to other users.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Image by Valentyn Volkov via Shutterstock.

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Fitbit’s Flex wristband goes on sale: harder to lose, easier to track

Ki Mae Heussner — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:32:07 +0000

When I started wearing Fitbit’s clip-on fitness tracker a few months ago, I loved how easy it was to hide. You can clip it to a pants pocket (or ladies can clip it to an undergarment) and no one has to know that it’s there.

But I, like a few of my colleagues and other users, soon discovered a downside to Fitbit’s (see disclosure) discreet design — it’s so inconspicuous that you can forget about it entirely. On several occasions, it ended up in my laundry hamper, on the verge of taking a dunk in the washing machine. And many days, I’d simply forget to re-attach it to an article of clothing.

So I was curious to check out Fitbit’s newest device, the Flex wristband, which the company debuted earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show and is available starting today.

Like the Nike Fuelband and Jawbone’s UP, the Flex is a sporty band worn around the wrist. It logs steps taken, distance traveled, hours slept and active minutes – a new stat measuring the number of moderate-intensity cardio minutes experienced a day. It syncs wirelessly via Bluetooth with Fibit iOS and Android apps and also displays data through an online dashboard.

I chose Fitbit’s One tracker over the Fuelband and UP precisely because I didn’t want an extra accessory on my wrist. But after wearing the Flex for a couple of days, I can see the benefits of the new design. It’s nice not rummaging through your laundry hamper to find the tracker or trying to find a suitable pocket each day on which to clip it. And while I loved the One’s sleep-tracking and alarm capabilities in theory, I rarely actually put it in the device’s nighttime wrist band so that it could do actually do its job. With the Flex, it’s easier to monitor sleep and use its wake-up feature because the tracker is already attached to your wrist (although you do need to remember to tap it into sleep mode).

I also liked the simplicity of the Flex’s display. With the One, I was constantly fumbling under layers to check my steps or loading the app and waiting for the Bluetooth connection to show my progress. But the Flex includes LED lights that indicate how close you are to achieving your daily goal instead of an actual screen that shares stats. With a couple of taps, it shows one to four lights, with each light representing 20 percent of your daily steps. When you reach your goal, the device buzzes in acknowledgement.

Still, despite the extra convenience I experienced with the new Flex design, I’m still not in love with its aesthetic. The band was more comfortable and unobtrusive than I expected it to be, but (like the Fuelband and UP) it’s still more of an accessory than I’d like it to be. It also took me a while to get the band to snap into place on my wrist (the company acknowledges that the clasp can be tricky but wanted to err on the side of making it more secure).

Those who already have a Fitbit or other activity tracking device might not be in a rush to buy another. But it’s an attractive, full-featured option for those in the market for an activity tracker — and its $99.95 price tag might be more appealing than the slightly more expensive Fuelbands and UPs.

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It’s not just about big data: here’s why small data matters to your health

Ki Mae Heussner — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:37:17 +0000

Big data may be a rising star in health care but small data can play a powerful role, too. At the TEDMED conference on Wednesday, Deborah Estrin, a computer science professor at New York City’s Cornell Tech, gave a compelling case for how your “digital exhaust,” including location data, searches and social media posts, could provide a valuable window into your wellbeing.

“We’re continuously generating digital breadcrumbs from the services we interact with,” she said. But “there are no existing vehicles that package that data about me in a format that’s useful for me and that make it accessible to me. [And] there should be because there’s a lot that I can learn about my personal health from my digital behavior.”

Search engines, social networks and mobile carriers capture and analyze that data to serve up advertising, improve services and provide personalization. But delivered to the user, Estrin said, that data could generate a “digital social pulse” for tracking health in more implicit ways than Fitbits (see disclosure), Nike Fuelbands and other quantified self-type devices.

For example, she said, an app could process data from a mobile carrier to determine whether new supplements for early-stage arthritis are actually helping a patient. If the patient is checking her phone earlier in the morning and moving around more frequently, that could indicate that the medicine its doing its job.

Service providers may balk at the prospect of releasing their troves of user activity data – and Estrin acknowledged that they would likely worry about PR headaches and privacy issues. But not only should enhanced transparency provide the foundation for a strong privacy policy, she argued that access to their data would make smartphones and data services even more valuable to customers.

Startups like Personal and the Locker Project have started building tools that help people manage and use their personal information. And Ginger.io uses sensor data from mobile phones and other devices to identify signals of behavior change to understand users’ mental and physical health.

But Estrin wants to encourage an entire ecosystem of apps. And, along with colleagues at the mobile health non-profit OpenM Health and Cornell Tech, she’s beginning to build prototypes that demonstrate the benefits of using small data for personal health, as well as create the architecture for service providers, app developers and others to create additional small data health apps and algorithms. (You can learn more about Cornell’s small data initiative here.)

“We need an open architecture, so that a rich market of apps and services can grow up around that data just like http created the World Wide Web and led to the rich array of internet services,” she said.

Image by Digital Storm via Shutterstock.

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Cody app makes a play as virtual coach for casual fitness fans

Ki Mae Heussner — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:00:12 +0000

Considering all the fitness apps already available — from Runkeeper and Nike+ to Fitocracy and MyFitnessPal, to name just a few — it’s hard to imagine that there’s still room for more.

But two former Microsoft product managers believe those apps cater to the more motivated fitness fiends among us. On Thursday, they rolled out Cody, a fitness app intended for everyone else.

“The way I observe the people who use existing apps today, I’d characterize them more as enthusiasts, and we hope that more and more of the mainstream will get into the space,” said co-founder Paul Javid. “[It's the difference between] what do the enthusiasts want versus more casual consumers of fitness.”

While other fitness apps emphasize metrics — either through GPS tracking that automatically calculates the distance of a run or the number of steps taken or through manual input – Javid said that to reach casual fitness fans (those who might only exercise a couple of times a week or less) Cody is more about the “stories” behind the activity. The image-heavy app encourages users to share posts about why a given activity is important to them or what’s happening around them, as well as tag their locations and add pictures to build up their “fitness graph.”

Cody also acts as a kind of virtual coach. When users first load the app, they’re asked to identify their goals – from losing weight to building muscle tone to de-stressing. For now, the app just surfaces original content about workouts, healthy living and other topics that match up with those goals. But, ultimately, Javid said, the plan is for Cody to learn from users’ activity and recommend articles, workouts, people or places that fit their interests. In time, he added, the app could integrate with fitness tracking devices to get an even more comprehensive view of each user.

Prior to launching the app, the startup created a couple hundred pieces of original content but it soon plans to syndicate content from fitness and health site Greatist and could distribute content from other sources in the future.

When Javid and his co-founder Pejman Pour-Moezzi first left Microsoft about a year ago to focus on a startup, their plan was to build a social app that would help people accomplish their personal goals – in a manner not so unlike that of Lift, the Obvious Corp.-backed good-habit-building app. But Javid said they soon observed that about half of the early beta users had fitness- or health-related goals, so they switched tacks to focus on those needs. To date, they’ve raised $200,000 in seed funding from Ken Irving, a member of a powerful oil family in Canada.

Given all the recent interest in digital health and quantified-self-type activity tracking tools, it’s not surprising that more entrepreneurs are hoping they can carve out opportunities with new tools. But while I think Cody’s highly visual design and clean layout could appeal to consumers who are just starting to get their feet wet in fitness, the crowded landscape could be a big challenge. While other fitness apps may not provide “coaching” and content, they’re already amassing tons of users’ fitness and health data and could, at some point, roll out data-driven recommendations as well. Also, when it comes to socializing around workouts, plenty of people already use Facebook and Twitter to share workouts, and Fitocracy already offers a dedicated social network for fitness.

Interestingly, among early beta testers, Cody’s founders have found that the app is especially popular among yoga, crossfit and bar method enthusiasts who don’t focus on metrics in the same way runners and bikers might. While the beta group has been small, it will be interesting to see if that trend continues.

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Vamonos! Runkeeper adds support for new languages in global sprint

Ki Mae Heussner — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 16:30:57 +0000

Runkeeper, one of the more popular fitness tracking apps, has already found its way on to millions of smartphones overseas. But the company is making an even bigger international push by adding support for 6 new languages.

Already two-thirds of its 17 million users are in more than 200 countries outside the U.S., the company told me Wednesday. But Runkeeper believes that there are many others who would use the app if not for the language barrier.

To date, the company has offered the app in English only, but added Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese. As of today, the changes are live for Android users and the iPhone version is comings soon, Runkeeper said.

Given rising competition among fitness tracking apps and devices — and the foothold the company already has overseas — it’s not surprising that Runkeeper wants to ramp up international outreach.

Runkeeper, which launched in 2008, has a strong user base. But Nike, for example, has said that its Nike+ community (encompassing its app and devices) includes 11 million people and MapMyFitness, another fitness tracking company, said it crossed the 10 million member mark last summer. Nike and MapMyFitness already support other languages.

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Jawbone brings its UP fitness bracelet to Android, returns to Europe

Ki Mae Heussner — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:26:37 +0000

Nike might not be interested in making its Fuelband fitness app Android-friendly (for now). But Jawbone isn’t going to leave Android-bearing health tracking enthusiasts in the lurch.

Four months after releasing its new Jawbone UP fitness band and iOS app, the San Francisco-based company announced on Wednesday that it had launched an app for Android.

“Everyone wants to improve upon themselves; we’ve found this to be a fundamental human desire, no matter where a person is starting from or what they want to achieve,” Travis Bogard, Jawbone vice president of product management and strategy, said in a statement. “Today marks a big step toward our commitment to help people establish a basis for behavior change by bringing UP to everyone who wants to live better lives.”

As competition ramps up among companies bringing quantified self-type gadgets to the market, it makes sense that Jawbone doesn’t want to leave Android fans (a sizeable share of smartphone users) without an app of their own. Jawbone’s UP, Nike’s Fuelband, the Misfit Shine, as well as devices from Fitbit (see disclosure below), Striiv and FitBug all promise wannabe fitness enthusiasts different levels of activity tracking and they all would love to be the stewards of the growing mounds of fitness- and health-related data. Neither Jawbone nor Nike has shared the number of people using their fitness bands but about one year after launching, Nike said that 11 million people were a part of the Nike+ community.

In addition to launching on Android, Jawbone also said that it had returned to Europe (the company offered its initial UP band in the US and Europe as well).

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Tictrac opens up to help make health tracking more mainstream

Ki Mae Heussner — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:50:34 +0000

Activity-logging wristbands, sleep trackers, heart rate monitors and the other accoutrements of the growing Quantified Self movement are all well and good. But, for now, it’s mostly just early adopter techies and health geeks who use them, and for the most part they don’t get a big picture view of their aggregated data and underlying patterns.

But Tictrac has an answer to that in the form of a personal analytics dashboard that it launched in closed beta last year and opened up to the public this week.

The startup integrates with about 50 APIs to enable people to pull in data from apps like Runkeeper, trackers like Fitbit (see disclosure below) and sleep monitoring tools like Sleepio. Once the data is ingested in Tictrac, users can see easier-to-understand visualizations of each data stream as well identify relationships between the different parts of their lives.

“Our focus with Tictrac is around bringing together all lifestyle factors with respect to health,” said CEO and founder Martin Blinder. “What affects you in one aspect of your life will affect you in another.”

Since launching in private beta a year ago, the company has mostly focused on being a consumer web service. But, Blinder said, Tictrac has started working with employers and health and fitness experts to make health tracking more accessible and helpful to those with (or at risk for) chronic conditions. It recently closed a deal with European telecom company Telefonica to support a corporate wellness program and other similar partnerships are likely ahead.

On the site, Tictrac helps users organize their data around “projects” related to goals like losing weight or lifestyle changes like caring for a newborn. This week, the startup rolled out four new projects for asthma, diabetes, chronic bronchitis and blood pressure. Through those projects, health professionals and fitness coaches can tailor programs for their patients and clients and use the site to assess progress.

For example, for a patient at risk for diabetes, a doctor could create a project that outlines activity and nutrition recommendations and then follow the patient’s activity, weight loss, eating habits and more. Because Tictrac allows users to integrate their calendars, travel schedules, email and other non-health data, a doctor monitoring a patient with asthma could use Tictrac to identify potential lifestyle patterns related to when asthma attacks were triggered.

Other startups and companies are starting to offer more sophisticated and social patient engagement and corporate wellness platforms. And Tictrac isn’t the only company looking to help consumers aggregate their health data to uncover insights. Earlier this month, for example, we reported that WebMD and Qualcomm Life have teamed up to offer a health hub that similarly enables people to sync and analyze data from multiple health tracking tools. But Tictrac (which has only raised an angel round but says it isn’t looking to raise more funding now because it’s earning revenue) is an interesting startup to watch because it makes the data easy to follow, visually compelling and meaningful.

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Designing for health tech? Remember the 7 deadly sins

Ki Mae Heussner — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:03:20 +0000

Plenty of entrepreneurs are trying to capitalize on the growing consumer and investor interest in digital health, but if you want to snare some money from at least one venture capitalist you might want to keep human vices — like lust, gluttony and greed — in mind.

At a SXSW Interactive panel Friday on how health tech companies can design products that encourage users to change their behavior, Mayfield Fund managing director Tim Chang said:

“The way I evaluate a lot of companies now is I look at the design framework. I look at the design framework of the seven deadly sins,” he said. “If an app or service does not tap into one or more of the seven deadly sins, either directly or indirectly, it will not be addicting…I always look along those dimensions.. and see what do those trigger.”

(If you’re particularly virtuous, or just haven’t though about those sins in a while, they’re lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride.)

The conversation, which also included Stanford behavioral health expert Stephanie Habif, Basis Science CEO Jeff Holove, and Wired writer Michael Copeland, is clearly relevant these days. Health tracking devices — whether worn on the wrist, clipped to your belt or attached to the body in another way — are flooding the market. But many of these devices, while purchased with the best intentions, end up getting left behind on the dresser (or lost in the wash) after just a couple of weeks because while they generate a lot of data about how far you walked or how well you slept, they don’t necessarily lead to healthier actions.

Public health has historically followed the logic that if you increase someone’s knowledge and persuade their attitude, you’ll get the behavior change you’re looking for, Habif said, but added “but that very rarely works.”

“Knowledge is not enough. Health does not happen in a silo. In terms of what I’ve learned over the years, in terms of health behavior theories we’re trying to operationalize for health behavior change, social is very important. Emotion is very important,” she said. “It’s not just enough to infect the brain and implant the knowledge, you have to stir up the desire engine. You have to tap into emotion.”

Devices and device-compatible health programs hold a lot of promise but, at this point, we don’t know if data tracking actually changes behavior, just that it leads to adherence to the devices, Habif said. But several companies are reporting positive results with programs that use both technology and human interaction (either from expert coaches or peers).

Chang mentioned Chicago-based Retrofit, which provides a subscription-based weight-loss plan that relies on tracking devices and remote communication with behavior coaches and nutritionists. Diabetes-busting Omada Health is also beginning to find success with a model that pairs digital tools with a social support program in which users communicate with a cohort of people who share health indicators and other factors.

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Basis raises $11.5M for health-tracking wristwatch, adds Deepak Chopra to advisory board

Ki Mae Heussner — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:33:18 +0000

As health-tracking companies battle it out for consumers’ hearts and minds — and wrists — Basis Science has announced that it has raised $11.5 million for its own sensor-based band that monitors a variety of health indicators.

The Series B round was led by Mayfield Fund and included existing investors, DCM and Norwest Venture Partners. Basis said that Tim Chang, Managing Director at Mayfield, joins its board of directors and technology analyst and active digital health investor Esther Dyson and healthy living expert Deepak Chopra join its advisory board.

With the new funding, CEO Jef Holove said the company will focus on hiring, especially seeking expertise in cloud services, hardware and software, and scaling its manufacturing.

The new funding comes as interest in consumer health tracking devices, particularly those that worn on the wrist, is ballooning. Users can choose from the Nike Fuelband to the Jawbone Up to the Fitbit Flex (see disclosure below) to other options.

At $199, Basis is more expensive than the Up ($129), Fuelband ($149.99) and Flex ($99.95) and it’s bigger than its competitors’ sleek bands, which may be a turn off for those who want to downplay the accessory. But Holove said the Basis band uses four sensors to capture motion, heart rate, perspiration and skin temperature, as opposed to just one (an accelerometer) used by rivals. With those sensors, it can do more than just track activity and calories burned, it can monitor sleep and heart rate as well. He also said that its dashboard, which encourages healthy habits on top of displaying data, is better able to keep users engaged. He previously told GigaOM that, in the future, the company may upsell users on more advanced cloud services that could offer better analytics or more data storage.

“We believe our foundation… will continue to give a much more comprehensive picture of health than anything else on the market,” Holove said in an email. “As we gain more user feedback, we will also continue to evolve our healthy habits approach to build engagement over time.”

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Danish ex-Nokians score $267K on Kickstarter for Leikr OpenStreetMap sports watch

David Meyer — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 18:10:05 +0000

At the start of January, a group of Nokia refugees in Copenhagen launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new wristwatch. And it’s quite a different beast from the Pebble, that greater poster-child for the crowdfunding platform; this one, the Leikr, does color maps too.

It’s a handy feature for runners — the maps use OpenStreetMap data and can integrate routes and online analytics with fitness app Endomondo — and it reflects the fact that the ex-Nokians in question are themselves keen athletes.

And now it’s definitely going to happen. The Leikr campaign shot for $250,000 and scored $267,389 at its closing a couple days ago. According to Seed Capital, which has already invested in Leikr company Acorn (not to be confused with the British computer manufacturer that spawned ARM some 23 years ago), this is a record for any Danish Kickstarter project.

The Leikr displays its maps and six data tiles on a 2-inch screen protected by Gorilla Glass, and it comes with downloadable workouts. One of the main features for athletes, though, is the zippy GPS fix time: 30 seconds max, apparently. I hear (I’ve not dived into the whole sports watch thing myself yet) that this is a sore point for rivals such as the Nike+ SportWatch.

The first units of the Leikr should be delivered in the U.S. sometime in the summer. With this and Jolla now going concerns, I wonder what else we will see come out of the Nokia-downsizing diaspora.

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