Google Glass

I'm a big fan of trying out new technology and tracking data about myself.  For example, see my post here about life (so far) with a Fitbit One.  I think that the new Google Glass would take that tracking to a whole new level.  Despite not having worn glasses since the fifth grade (long story), I'd be willing to get back in the groove and expand the human experience by being a Glass Explorer. However, given that only 8,000 invitations are going out to the most creative among us (living within reasonable travel distance to NY, LA or SanFran), I do not expect I would ever be a chosen one, so this will not be an application, rather just a collection of my thoughts on the subject.

By the way, what is wrong with mid-westerners or Texans, Google?  By omitting Chicago or Dallas as a city from which a person can pick up a Glass (you have to attend a special pick-up experience), you are omitting the heartland from this exercise.  I care only modestly what the coastal hipsters can dream up to do with these new fangled devices, but would love to see how real people in the middle of the country use them.  Is the point to record your skydiving adventures or to make life better for as many people as possible?

Things I would actually do with my Google Glass (for which I believe the functionality probably exists):

• Enjoy the view: I live outside of DC - there are a ton of places on and off of the beaten track that people should see.  Best choice is to go themselves, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that there are plenty of places I don't want to visit, but I'd love to see them (Moscow and Russia in general is on this list).  This is not an original thought, my first real thinking on the topic was done after I read this post on Marginal Revolution.  
• Run & Ride:  There are a lot of good trails near where I live.  I would like to share the trails at River Bend Park, Great Falls National Park, the Cross County Trail and other places with a wider audience in an easily produced sort of fashion.  Some can't run or ride, but should be able to explore nonetheless.
• Voice blog/track thoughts: as far as I can remember, I have some pretty good thoughts for blog posting or just ideas when I'm driving or otherwise in a position that I can't write things down.  I would love to collect these random thoughts simply.  "OK Glass, blog this for me:" and start rambling.  I would guess that I'd still want a keyboard and screen to help organize the thoughts later on, but initial gathering would be great.  Imagine yourself in the middle of a home-improvement project with lots of measurements to record/track.  Would be great to have them all recorded and retrieved with a few statements.
• Record my commute: better than a dashboard cam?  Probably not, but seems like it could serve the purpose without having to have a dedicated device.

Ways in which it would actually make my life better, if the functionality existed:

• Facial and voice recognition: I interact with several hundred people at other firms.  I can't keep track of them all.  How about an auto-facial/voice recognition mode that will fill me in on who I'm talking to without me having to say, "OK Glass, who is this joker and do I want to talk to them?"  Potentially also useful to other people with big families or politicians.  
• Food recognition: I am a fan of Lose It! to track my food intake.  How cool would it be if I could just put a credit card down on the table (for scale), take a picture of my meal and have the calories estimated?  Better still, record the meal in the background and process for the following: food calories, drink calories, appropriate number of chews per mouthful.  Provide feedback by meal, day or week.
• Workout/lift: I write down what I do every session that I work out.  My little dog-eared notebook is a relatively impenetrable database.  Why not record a workout and then process it down to its essentials: exercises performed, weights used, timing of each rep and set, heartrate through-out (bluetooth integration here?)?  The user could provide some guidance up front by inputting the plan and then speaking the exercise so that the processing is simplified.
• Little reminders: If it were near effortless, I'd love to be able to remind myself of certain things.  For instance, before I go to work tomorrow, remind me to bring my lunch.  I'd like to get this reminder as soon as I step into the garage tomorrow morning.  There is pretty much no way to make this happen with current technology, but if Glass was tracking where you were in your house at all times, this could be a reality.  Then, I would have no excuse for leaving without the right things.
• Track Daily Activities: I'm pretty good about flossing, brushing and washing my face.  Glass could be building up a database of things I normally do and remind me to do something when I leave it out of the routine.

Things I will not be doing with my Google Glass:

• Going to work:  Nope - I think that this will be a problem for almost everybody.  Nobody wants a potential recording device around in such an obvious way.  Yes, everybody's mobile phone can record conversations, even surreptitiously, but that isn't the primary purpose of such a device.  Given that the Google Glass is new, there will be concern.  Also, you'd love Google to be an additional searching tool, but in these litigious days, any of your work related materials can be "discoverable".  Do you want (or can your business tolerate) that?  Do you end up with work and personal Glasses?
• Sleeping: That would be seriously boring and pretty much useless.

P.S. I think that there will be some healthy debate over "Google Glasses" or "Google Glass".  But that could just be me and my cynical view of human language skills.

P.P.S. Imagine yourself leaving your house without your mobile phone today.  If you are anything like me you feel totally naked.  Imagine then a future state where you've been living with Google Glass for a year and you walk out of the house without them.  That would have to leave you feeling 10 times more naked than being without your phone.  Is this a good thing?

#ifihadglass

Fitbit - Thoughts a Month In

For those that know me, they know that I like to collect data about myself, my house and things around me (weather, etc.), but particularly about myself.  I have a Garmin GPS watch with a heart rate monitor and am disappointed that I could never get the foot pod to work and give me more information about my pace & stride.  When I saw the opportunity to get information not only about my daily activities, but my nightly activities, I jumped on it.

The Fitbit One is a small accelerometer/pedometer that has been enhanced in a number of very useful ways: it collects data all the time and is capable of transferring it via BlueTooth to your computer or to your iPhone and then synch with the Fitbit website.  It tracks your steps, your stairs climbed (rounded to the nearest flight) and your sleep.  Its as easy as hooking it onto your pants (or bra) and wearing it.  Very easy to use.

Fitbit has taken this One Step Beyond (maybe two) by doing the following things:

• Integrating a wi-fi scale/body fat measurement device called the Aria that synchronizes with the same data.  Pretty sweet.
• Allowing the user to track calories in via food intake.

Overall, I very much like the product and plan on using it for the long haul.  I've been happy to see it making in-roads amongst other nerds and believe Fitbit could have a good future in front of it.  I had a business lunch recently and three of the nerdier ones (myself proudly included in that group) were wearing their Fitbits and all were enthusiasts.  Keep that last comment in mind as you read the below comments, but I would definitely recommend you doing your homework and learning about the product before taking the plunge (but you'll probably want to take the plunge).

Here are my initial thoughts on the positives:

• Easy to get started: It took me only a few minutes to be up and running with my Fitbit.
• No continuing fees: The website is supported by your purchase of the device.  It costs nothing to keep using it.  Though I haven't looked into it, Fitbit appears to be looking for ways to add premium features (like coaching) to the website that would require an on-going payment.  I like the model, as long as it is successful and they don't start requiring me to pay for access (if I don't find the premium features worth the cost).
• Easy to keep it on:  I've been wearing it for over a month and have very rarely forgotten to make sure it's on.  Slight downside that one does have to keep track of one more thing.  My standard check before I leave the house (for phone, wallet, keys, watch) now includes Fitbit.  Not difficult addition to make to the routine.  The wrist band for use during sleep is comfortable and easy to use, as well.
• Well laid out website:  Fitbit's website is mostly easily navigated and you can get to where you want to be quickly.  Body measurements are buried a little bit far, but it does make some sense that they are 
• Long battery life: I charge maybe once per week and there still seems to be a fair amount of juice in the Fitbit.
• Excellent application integration:  Fitbit has some real potential for an eco-system to develop around it.  There are a number of applications available - my favorite part is that Lose It! calorie data can by synch'ed.  Lose It! is my favorite app for easily entering meals and then entering them again in the future.  I'm a creature of habit.  My breakfasts and lunches rarely change too much.
• Can "invite" lots of people to the scale: You get seven invitations for people that can be users of the scale and set up a free Fitbit account to track their body fat and weight.
• Can track other both measurements:  Specifically measurements that matter to me: blood pressure, pulse, and various size measurements (chest, hips, thighs, biceps, forearms, etc.).

Here are my initial thoughts on the negatives:

• Sleep monitoring is very flakey:  The bottom line here is that I don't much trust the sleep monitoring results.  I sleep pretty soundly most of the time and the most useful aspect of the sleep tracking for me will be just the total amount of time asleep.  My wife does not sleep soundly.  She had a night this week where she couldn't sleep for hours - until well after 2am and the Fitbit claimed she slept the whole time.  Gave her a 90% sleep efficiency score.  Not at all realistic.  Also problematic, there is no way to provide Fitbit feedback on this to help them improve.  Perhaps this is just a really hard problem?  [Note that there is a "sensitive" option for sleep tracking, that I just found when poking around the website.  I will use this and see if my results seem more reasonable.]
• Built-in food/calorie tracking is lacking:  I have found it not nearly as convenient/easy to log food and meals on Fitibit as compared to Lose It!  Not a fatal flaw given the comment about the app environment above.
• Would prefer more customizability of the dashboard: From what I can tell, I have no ability to change what I see as a default.  For instance, I don't care so much what my weight is right now, I care more about my body fat percentage.  Perhaps I'm deluding myself that it could happen at my age, but I do lift regularly and would have no problem if my weight stayed constant or went up if my body fat was decreasing at the same time.  It would mean that I was just that much more "buff".
• More flexibility in presenting data, generally:  Allow the users to build graphs that matter to them.  The interface should allow both x-y scatter plots as well as temporal graphs.
• Lack of transparency in body fat calculations:  Fitbit only provides a number (would it be hard to provide a "Learn More" link that they goes into the nuance -- only those that are interested will follow it and you won't confuse those who don't care?).   What they don't provide you with is any sort of perspective on what information they are or are not using.  From what I can tell, they have to be using gender, but beyond that, its not clear if they are using age or height or other body measurements.  They also don't provide you with any guidance as to your confidence interval around the measurement (i.e., what is the 5th percentile to 95 percentile range that your body fat could be given that the statistical relationships are not super strong).  See here for some initial introduction to Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA).  All that said, BIA is supposed to be useful in tracking an individual's body fat over a period of time.  Just try to be as consistent as possible in when and how you take your measurements.  I wake up, pee and then weigh.  Hopefully, I'm not over of under-hydrated and I should get a good day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month view of my body fat.  
• Give me direct access to my data: Not through some data vault that Microsoft has developed, but via XML and CSV.  Perhaps this will come over time?  Seems pretty important for me to have long-term confidence in Fitbit.
• Can't wear it in the shower:  Not really serious.

Obviously there are aspects of the Fitbit that I can't comment on (yet):

• Durability: I've only had it for a month.  Haven't dropped it from any height or seen it withstand something impressive.
• Battery life over the long term:  Off to a good start as noted above, but its long-term usability will depend heavily on long battery life.  I don't need something else to charge in everyday.

Areas where I would like Fitbit to improve (not explicitly or implicitly noted above):

• Recognizing what you are doing automatically:  I went skiing with my Fitbit.  It seems to me that Fitbit ought to start asking you if you are skiing if it has tell-tale signs.  These signs should easily crunched out of Fitbit's own data given that presumably thousands of users are logging their activities and Fitbit has their accelerometer data for these periods of time.
• Improve on the silly badges: I don't have great suggestions here, but it would seem like they could come up with some more meaningful badges than what they have.  Perhaps a little fun and silliness is all that they should be, but if so, let me turn them off.  Perhaps what they should really do is allow users to create badges that can be shared by the others in the community.  I'd be interested to see what other people find noteworthy about their health.
• Allow for more nuanced goals: I'd like to maintain a certain minimum percentage of my day that is non-sedentary.  This goal is probably best viewed on a rolling average basis (maybe two or three day average), but matters more to me than just a one day value.
• Improve alarm features: I'd like to have the Fitbit One buzz when I've been sedentary for a particular period of time.  I spend a lot of time in front of my computer at work five days a week.  It'd be good to know when I should think about stretching my legs and doing a lap around the office.  Fortunately, this seems like it can be dealt with solely by software (so we may see this improve).  This may be asking a bit much, but would iCal integration be that hard?

What do you think Fitbit needs to do better?  I plan on doing a follow-up post six or so months in to let you know what my thoughts are then.  Maybe Fitbit will have added some of above requests?

Dead Apple TV

I have had an Apple TV since there was one (spring 2007, for the curious).  Thought it would be a cool device to rent movies on the fly with.  It has served that purpose, and pretty much only that purpose since I've bought it.  I considered myself reasonably happy with the purchase (but not extremely so).

It died tonight as evidenced from my failed attempts to purchase Looper and watch it.  At first, I thought it might have something to do with the HDMI going through my receiver, but after isolating that issue, it became obvious that it was just the Apple TV screwing up.  My son googled the issue and within seconds declared that it was a video card issue.  Oh well.  Its dead and their probably won't be another one in the house in the future.

Update 2013-02-24:  After looking at my options, I decided to replace the Apple TV with a Roku 2 XD.  The content options look better on Roku than Apple TV - the former really only having one option (iTunes) from which to rent movies.  While not a terrible choice, it seems a bit limiting.  Worst case scenario, Amazon has the same movie set (from what my limited research indicates) available for $0.01 less.  Not a huge discount, but there will be options.