Chapter 7 Human data

Data associated with human life. The quantified self movement is a powerful (and moving) example of personal science and experimental design thinking. It is an experiment of one with trial and error and pre-post intervention thinking. Numerous trackers including smartwatches, phones, dedicated movement trackers such as Fitbits track steps, sleep, heart rate, and numerous other potential indicators of some components of life though big data (Swan 2013). This is an opportunity to apply experimental designcraft to yourself and use these experiments to make evidence-informed decisions about exercise, sleep, and work patterns. Gamification is not so different from experimentation in this context and a compelling opportunity to have some fun with activities that you are already doing (Whitson 2013).

Learning outcomes

  1. Work with an existing dataset and reuse it.
  2. Design questions from data about a single person walking and sleeping (but not sleepwalking).
  3. Connect principles of experimental design to implementation with data.
  4. Write a clear hypothesis and predictions to explain or predict patterns in data.
  5. Communicate data, design, and science succinctly.

Steps

  1. Download the dataset.
  2. Read the meta-data.
  3. Explore research on quantified self and human health, and prep a list of questions for the data.
  4. Test one question with the data via a plot and a statistical test.
  5. Decide if this is the dataset for you to write up as short research note.

Data

Here are the data collected by me. I wear a simple Fitbit tracker (old one) that tracks only steps and sleeps - not heart rate.

Deeper dive

If you choose this adventure, your goal is to explore any component of the data to apply design principles. In this example, the design and experimentation process can examine changes through time in one variable, relationships between variables, or make predictions about change and health and activity through time for this human being. Pattern and prediction are both possible with these data. Do some work, some thinking, try some designs with the data, and make the call if this is data-design lab you will write up.