In July, I attended ResBaz Brisbane and went to a session by Griffith Uni’s amazing Amanda Miotto. Amanda is a Senior eResearch Analyst and is central to the hugely popular Hacky Hour. I was super impressed with her knowledge and excellent advice for researchers on how to use technology more effectively.
In a recent consultation with Amanda, I mentioned my bike ride fieldwork in Africa and how I was thinking of some way to represent my bio and located data.
She said I should pitch my idea to Health Hack to see what a team could achieve. So here are my initial ideas for my Problem Owner submission.
We are pitching our ideas in the next couple of weeks, but the actual Health Hack will be on 20-22nd September 2019.
I’ll let you know how it all goes!
Health Hack
Based on a Hackthon model, Health Hack is a product-building event that runs from a Friday evening through to Sunday.
Teams work on problems that have been submitted by Problem Owners – typically medical researchers, medical organisations, hospitals or government— but they could come from anyone who has a health-related problem they want to solve.
You can check out more about it at the Health Hack website.
My Problem Definition
The first step is to submit a problem definition. Here is what I submitted.
Problem title: BioMap
What is the problem you want to solve?
Currently, there are many personalized tech devices (such as Fitbits) being used to monitor and track health. These devices can be beneficial in motivating, documenting and sharing aspects of health, but their functionality suggests that health, exercise and the environment are individual and separate components of heath and daily life activities. Although useful to a point, these products undermine a greater understanding of health as holistic, intra-related and complex.
The main drawbacks of current devices is that the scope and functionality is usually limited to one aspect of health (i.e. steps per day/cardio), data is not easily integrated with other data (personalized apps), and very few devices take into account the impact of wider environmental determinates (i.e. beyond GPS, altitude).
What is needed is a solution that seamlessly integrates already available personal health metrics (HR, exercise output, GPS, sleep) with other environmental determinates, like seasonal weather patterns, wind, temperature, terrain, light, humidity and other corporeal/embodied sensations to
My PhD research explores how bicycles feature in rural African girls’ access to education. I am most interested in the embodied, geographical and environmental conditions that girls experience every day when riding a bike to get to school and home. Previous educational research focuses heavily on cultural, economic and structural interrogations of girls’ education, but few take into account what it is like to actually get to and from school.
To achieve this, I would like to collaborate with others to build a dashboard called BioMap. I see BioMap as a way to combine a range of biometric, sensory, health, geographic and environmental overlays into one single, easy-to-use, interactive data visualization. The display includes a map of Africa that c
BioMap is needed to show the complex, interrelated and unique environmental and bodily forces that local girls contend with as they make their school journeys on bikes. This solution will be an invaluable and original contribution to expanding current understandings of the local conditions these girls travel through.
I feel this would be reusable for other researchers and other people interested in emplaced embodied biometrics.
Why do you want to solve this problem?
Contextualizing and situating the conditions of riding a bicycle through a particular environment will better enable researchers and individuals to understand a fuller picture of the emplaced body. This will enable quick identification of factors that far exceed the standard health assessment. The BioMap will help situate users to better appreciate the ‘broader picture’ and consider more widely the elements that support or deter a person as they move through a specific environment.
One of my motivations to participate in Health Hack is to collaboratively build and share a solution that will encourage researchers, developers and educators to think more divergently, holistically and critically about the materiality of the contexts in which they are working.
That is why I think an Open Source dashboard would be the most generative, useful and realistic output for this Health Hack. I am interested to see how Health Hack programmers might go about doing this, for example, is it best to get APIs that can read from devices such as FitBits, Garmin, weather and other sources and them plug it into something like R and Python that will give us the ability to make our own output, or can the team suggest an alternative?
Or if the team want to make it themselves or use something that plugs into an Open Source Dashboard software (if it is) already out there. An added bonus for an Open Source output is that it would be a unique and generative contribution to publish and the team creators could provide examples on GitHub, add labels to it, put their names on it and get licenses. Kudos!
Conversely, there might be a different configuration the team might like to try depending on time, interest, skills or if there is other software, suggestions or ideas people have in mind that would fit.
What do you envision as the ideal solution for this problem?
I would like a platform created that shows a range of blah de blah, so that I can show the conditions that these girls (or others) experience as they travel. I envisage BioMap as being a dashboard that combines a range of biometric, sensory, health, geographic and environmental overlays into one single, easy-to-use, interactive data visualization.
BioMap is a dashboard platform that combines a range of biological, sensory and environmental data so that users can not only explore each dataset individually, but can also shift between, and overlay different indicators to see how each influences the health of the person as a whole.
What sort of Open Source solution do you think can be created in 48 hours, by a small team of developers, designers and data analysts?
I am keen
Any extra work that could be done to achieved this would be an added and welcome bonus. For example, given the time (and if we have a crack team), it would be awesome to get a dashboard that includes a map of Africa that can be zoomed in and out of where I could turn different overlays on and off.
My initial conceptualisation is to use a map (i.e. of Africa via Google Maps) which can be zoomed into and out of, with a box on the side panel that has the other trip indicators/overlays. When you click on each one, you can select whether you wish to view it by itself, of you can overlay (or layer up) on the map so you can trace indices of for example; place (GPS, altitude, distance), space (video footage, pace, timing), environment (weather, air, and terrain) and body (HR, exercise, etc) changes while the body is undertaking daily routines and activities – such as travelling to and from school.
Keeping in mind Health Hack has a set amount of time, the output I am most keen to achieve is a dashboard (map) that overlays APIs datasets from the biometric devices/sources. Depending on time, skill and interest, I would be very happy to explore any other add-ons, extensions or ideas the team might have.
Are there datasets or people with domain knowledge that you will be bringing to work with? What/who are they?
Yes. I will be bringing all of my own biometric datasets to populate BioMap including data from these sensor/devices:
I will also be using a
Please note, only my own biometric data will be collected and published at any time.
I have licensed my biometric data.
What are the current solutions for handling this problem?
There
