Own Your Data – A Beginners Guide to Daily Biometrics

I recently watched a great TED talk by Talithia Williams titled Own Your body’s data. Here is the brief.

The new breed of high-tech self-monitors (measuring heart rate, sleep, steps per day) might seem targeted at competitive athletes. But Talithia Williams, a statistician, makes a compelling case that all of us should be measuring and recording simple data about our bodies every day — because our own data can reveal much more than even our doctors may know.

This compelled me to begin thinking about what data I can collect and what would be useful.

Minimalist Triathlete approach

I started with a simple google search for Daily Biometrics for Athletes. The first link was to a blog post by the Minimalist Triathelte. He outlined his (5) daily biometrics.

1. Dehydration Urine Color Chart
2. Weight
3. Number of Quality hours slept
4. Resting Heart Rate
5. Heart Rate Variability (HRV)

He also referenced the tools and apps he uses to capture data. The restwise app for overall recovery, Jawbone UP for sleep tracking, Withings Wi-Fi scale for weight/body fat%/BMI, and the iThlete app for HRV. He also goes into detail about the steps he follows to capture his data. It is straight forward and only takes a few minutes.

I used this as the basis for my own data collection methodology.

Why should I care about data?

According to the American Heart Association someone dies of heart disease or stroke every 40 seconds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics show that 610,000 americans die from heart disease each year. That is 1 in 4 deaths.

Heart Disease Risk Factors

• Diabetes
• Overweight and obesity
• Poor diet
• Physical inactivity
• Excessive alcohol use

If you are like me and have a busy life with children, a spouse, and work. You don’t make time to eat right or exercise. I generally know that there are areas I could improve. What data provides is an objective measure. A point in time of your health. When compared to population data you know if you are within the healthy range. Where data becomes more powerful though is to trend the data over time. This will identify if you are improving or not and is the key to why you should care about YOUR data.

What data is useful?

If you made it this far you may want to begin collecting your own data. I will provide what I collect as a starting point. This is still a work in progress but I have a few categories.

Categories and Measurements

• Waking / Resting Information
  • Temperature (degrees)
  • Heart Rate (beats per minute) / O2 Saturation
• Body Composition
  • Weight (pounds) / BMI
  • Body Fat %
• Sleep
  • Total time slept (minutes)
  • Total deep time slept (minutes)
• Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
  • HRV4Training
  • iThlete
• Blood Pressure
  • Systolic / Diastolic

My gadgets are very basic. I currently have a pulse oximeter for resting heart rate and oxygen saturation. I use an standard digital scale for weight and I have a body composition meter that I input the daily weight into before testing. The HRV data is gathered by the respective applications on my smartphone. HRV4Training allows the use of my flash and camera. iThlete requires a chest sensor. The Polar H7 seems to be the most common and popular. I use a temporal scanning thermometer for temperature and finally I have an Mi Band activity tracker for sleep data.

Data Gathering Process

1. When I wake up I immediately take my resting heart rate and temperature
2. Sync my activity tracker to capture sleep data
3. Input the data into an online spreadsheet
4. Get up and weigh myself and take body fat % measurement
5. Input the data into an online spreadsheet
6. Take a 60 second reading with both HRV apps

I input the data in two separate sequences because I can’t remember all the individual values otherwise.

Once the data is in the spreadsheet I have it graphed. You can see over time the trends lines. Because there is a wide disparity in values I have multiple charts but I like the overview to quickly see the trends. I DON’T expect most people to do this manually. There are many tools that are coming together to automate the process of capturing and saving the data.

Wrapping Up

Once the data is captured you can analyze the data to take actionable steps in your life. Do you need to lose weight? Take more steps? Sleep more? Once you quantify your life into data you can answer whether or not you are moving in the right direction.

I used this data recently. I have had a persistent cough for at least 6 weeks. It was driving my wife crazy. At our new child’s first pediatric appointment she asked the doctor to listen to my chest. The first question was have you been running a fever. I said no and told her that I have 60 days of waking temperature data. Because I hadn’t had a fever and my chest sounded fine that put my wife at ease.

I also have wellness goals I’d like to mark off my list. Having a this data gives me a starting point to measure objectively not only if I am improving but in what area’s whether it be fat loss, resting heart rate, or HRV. If you are an athlete I encourage you to research HRV. It is a fascinating measurement to determine the amount of stress on your body from under or over training.

Reference documents

Want to know the normal range for the biometrics above?

See my wishlist for gagdets I’d like to improve my data collection.