A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.
This basic framework has been shaped and refined by thinkers and researchers for ages. In the 18th century, engineers developed regulators and governors to modulate steam engines and other mechanical systems, an early application of feedback loops that later became codified into control theory, the engineering discipline behind everything from aerospace to robotics. The mathematician Norbert Wiener expanded on this work in the 1940s, devising the field of cybernetics, which analyzed how feedback loops operate in machinery and electronics and explored how those principles might be broadened to human systems.
-- Thomas Goetz from Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops, Wired Magazine, June 2011
Under Armour worked with Firstborn on a new website and social media campaign based around its current advertising theme, "I Will". The HTML-based site lets users view dynamic photographs of the athletes in the campaign, with video and interactive product content. Meanwhile with "Show Your iWILL" the brand also invites fans to make "I Will" pledges on Twitter, which are then displayed on the site. Fans can also upload photos of themselves. Online media as well as the TV spots direct people to the microsite.
While many of us have found that the common activity trackers function as a kind of diary, with even the minimal traces of activity able to spur our memories about what we’ve been up to, sometimes they record data that is mysterious. For instance, the graph below show’s Eric’s highest activity day. “I do not know what I doing during the three hours when I clocked most of the steps, but it wasn’t walking,” he reports.
Demographics & Basics
Age distribution: mean = 36.2 years old, youngest = 23 years old, oldest = 74 years old
Gender distribution: 67% male / 33% female
Currently working in a QS related company or have created a QS tool: 30%
Members who have a chronic health issue: 70%
What Tools Are You Using? The top 10 most used tools were: Mint, Personal GoogleDoc/spreadsheet, Other, Foursquare, 23andMe, Fitbit, Runkeeper, Zeo, MyFitnessPal, and Goodreads with the Nike+ Fuelband and Lift just missing the top 10.
Data Sharing & Privacy
Privacy is still important. Only 49% of respondents share their data with anyone and only 27% of respondents said they were ‘vey open’ to sharing their data with others.
Share data with someone else: 51%
Share data with a spouse/partner: 39%
Share data with a health professional: 14%
“If the fabrics can change their pattern, shape or structure, we get a variety of expressions from the same material. From an environmental perspective, this is of great importance as most of us feel the need to replace and change clothes and other textiles often. Smart textiles can have multiple lives, which is advantageous in view of resource use and waste issues.”
E-textile is short for electronic- or electro- textile. E-textiles are essentially fabrics with electronics and other components that are embedded in, or intrinsic to, the fabric such that the fabric maintains its key properties, like draping.
Smart fabrics are generally defined as, well, smart. This means a fabric can not only sense the environment, but also react to it. Scenarios include a fabric that warms you when you’re cold, cleans itself when it’s dirty (hooray!), lights up to ensure you’re visible when it’s dark, and automatically stiffens to protect you when you’re falling. Smart clothes could monitor your fitness parameters as you train and give you advice to modify your workout, during your workout. And of course smart clothes would recharge your mobile device while it was tucked in your pocket.
The potential of e-textiles and smart clothes is best demonstrated by applications in two key areas: health/medical and sports/professional performance and safety. These niches tend to be where cutting-edge development occurs and thus are good indicators of products and technology that may move mainstream.
Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, according to researchers. When one person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight too.
Their study, published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067 people who had been closely followed for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003. The investigators knew who was friends with whom, as well as who was a spouse or sibling or neighbor, and they knew how much each person weighed at various times over three decades.
“Many of us in modern society have jobs which involve sitting at a computer all day,” says Dr. Emma Wilmot, a research fellow at the University of Leicester in England, who led the study. “We might convince ourselves that we are not at risk of disease because we manage the recommended 30 minutes of exercise a day.”
But, she says, we “are still at risk if we sit all day.”
