I track my exercise – but then what?

By F. Daniel Nicolalde, Project HealthDesign - PhD Student - UW-Madison.

Like most cyclists, I own a small bike computer that allows me to keep track of my speed, cadence, and distance.  Unfortunately, tracking my exercise can still be a rather difficult task as I still need the motivation, payback, and technology to translate this data into meaningful information.

Bad
Last season I used a time consuming paper-based bicycle journal to keep track of my rides. I managed to have three entries during the whole biking season.  The only tangible data I walked away with was a running count of kilometers that the bike computer stored – over 1,000. 

Better
Before this year’s biking season started, I purchased a heart rate monitor that allows me to maintain an online profile of my exercise routines.  All the data that the system stores is primarily quantitative - taken straight from the heart rate monitor and the bike computer. Unfortunately, the system has no automated upload so I have to enter all the information manually.  Thus far I have entered more than twenty entries.  While the system has limitations, it displays the data in a couple of ways.

Hopefully the future holds the best
It was my goal to share my exercise data with my personal health record. This task hasn’t proven to be straightforward.  The online system exported an XML file but my PHR wasn’t able to interpret the content, so now I have an XML file in my PHR with all my exercise information on it.  Storing health information in proprietary information system creates silos of information, which can only be interpreted by the system that generated it.  As a biker, a consumer of health technologies, and exercise gadget owner, I’d like to echo what Patti Brennan said in her last post, we should ask for true interoperability and not be bonded to one particular vendor.

If you keep track of you exercise routines, I’d like to know how and what motives you to maintain the record. Should these types of observations of daily living be part of our health records? And if so, with whom should we share them?

Comments

[Janebpeace]

Great observations about exercise tracking. As a nurse practitioner, I see this information as valuable in a PHR. I would like to be able to review it with a client so together we could set goals and understand how much exercise s/he is getting. And as a consumer, I would really like for this information capture to be automatic and ubiquitous. Seeing my exercise record helps me be realistic about what I am currently doing and what I can do, and to set goals that I can achieve.

[Gillian Hayes]

I used to track my walking/running. I was on a project at Intel years ago focused on "digital health" and everyone was really into pedometers and so on. As soon as the battery died, I quit, and I've never gone back. I know I should pay more attention to it, but I just can't bring myself to change out batteries and try to get data off those things and everything else. I remember when I was a kid, my mom had a pedometer powered by the motion of walking.... why can't someone invent that again and have it transfer automatically to my phone or computer so I don't have to do anything? That would be my favorite.... no work... lots of tracking benefits :)

[John Bye]

Really interesting post, thanks.

Heart rate and other exercise monitors definitely capture a wealth of data that could be useful in your personal health record and I think (hope!) we'll see integration in future - non-proprietry data capture would be a big forward step (I think there's more chance of seeing it with data than with Shimano's components at least!).

My opinion would be that the big challenge lies in making the information we have from all these sources useful - because, (to paraphrase Herbert Simon) information consumes attention, hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

[Tim Patton]

I too used to track my rides. I would track the same things as Daniel. I bought the ‘fancy” computer with internal memory to store a history of such stuff (expensive back in 1996), providing current indications as to how I was doing according to my ongoing average.

After tracking this for some while, I found that these weren’t really the things I wanted to track. Yes, I know I’m going slower than average… Because I’m climbing some really ridiculous hill right now. What I really wanted to know was how my hill climb today compared to last week. The computer just didn’t facilitate that. So, while the computer is still attached to my bike, the batteries have been dead for years.

Beyond the ability to import data as is, I think the most important ability for PHRs will be the ability to create novel, derived information. For my example above, the PHR might be able to take GPS data from my cell phone and combine that with timestamped bike computer data to provide meaningful context… to find that I did climb the hill faster this week! As John pointed out above, we have to insure that we spend our precious attention on what really matters.

[Fisher]

Try something like the FitBit that automatically uploads your data and then gives you a host of nutrition tracking tools. Also, Livestrong.com has great tools available people to track fitness and diet among other things with a slick interface! The Quantified Self revolution is coming!

[Robert Hess]

Tracking exercise results is a fun activity but, as you point out, complex and time consuming, depending on the system you use. To simplify the process for people who just want to capture total data and trends, we built some basic functionality into the MyBikeInfo iPhone/iPod Touch app. MyBikeInfo captures individual ride mileage, vertical climb, average heart, and a full range of power training metrics. Users input their ride data and once there are at least two data points the app draws a trend line for that metric. The user can visually see if performance is improving. On the health side, we have included metrics for cholesterol, blood pressure (diastolic and systolic) and prostate specific antigen for prostate cancer screening. We are adding alerts in the next version to remind people wHen they are due for their next test.