It’s an honour to be here, thank you all for inviting me. Like John said, my name is Chris Pacione, I’m Chief Creative Officer at a company I co-founded called BodyMedia, located in Pittsburgh PA. Essentially, if you want to describe us in a few words, we’re a healthy lifestyle company. We provide Internet applications and wearable health monitors to help people live what’s called a balanced, healthy lifestyle.

What’s a healthy lifestyle? Quickly defined, it’s eating well, getting proper rest, staying active, staying centred (taking time out for mind-centring techniques like meditation), and taking responsibility – that’s making sure you don’t work more than nine hours a day, refraining from smoke-filled environments, and so on.

What we essentially do, being a healthy lifestyle company, is we figure out a way to measure what we call ‘wellness’. It’s like your bathroom scales – we’re the bathroom scales on steroids. We figured out a way to measure how well you’re eating, how much rest you’re getting, how active you are, and so forth, five important things. Through a combination of wearable body monitors and Internet applications, you can see more than just your weight, but some representation of, ‘Am I getting enough exercise?’ ‘Am I sleeping enough?’

There’s a saying in English, which goes, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ How many people here – raise your hand! – had exercise this morning, or plan to get 20 minutes of aerobic exercise today, or 60 minutes of vigorous exercise, like 60 minutes of walking, just raise your hand, raise it high. OK (a number of hands go up). Now everybody else who doesn’t have their hand up, you’re all disqualified.

Of those remaining people with their hands up, how many of you got seven to nine hours of uninterrupted sleep last night? (most hands go down). Oh! We got four people left? Of the remaining four, do you usually take time out to monitor your stress, like for instance, do you meditate or do yoga daily for 20 minutes?

Well, unfortunately, eating an apple a day isn't enough, and essentially what our system is about is prevention. I want to talk a little bit about why we’re doing what we’re doing.

The reason is that we’ve seen a problem, particularly in America, I don’t know if it translates to Europe or not. Poor lifestyle, that is, people who don’t live a balanced, healthy lifestyle, cause a ton of problems. 60 to 90 per cent of people in primary care have symptoms attributable to poor lifestyle habits. It’s because they’re not sleeping right, it’s because they’re not eating right, they’re not managing their stress, they’re working too long, that they are at high risk of coronary heart disease, obesity, stroke, etc.

And so while it’s the cause, lifestyle is also the cure right? The most effective intervention available for reducing major preventable causes of death is living a balanced, healthy life. Not just eating the apple, but sleeping well, eating well and so forth.

Easier said than done. It’s everything your mother told you. But why don’t we do it? There’s four main reasons why we don’t do it.

Number one: people don’t understand what the components of a balanced healthy lifestyle are. People don’t look at lifestyle holistically. So we define that.

Number two: People don’t understand what barriers stand in the way of establishing a healthy daily routine. If you were going to help me lose weight or quit drinking, that’s behaviour modification, and it needs four steps in order for to work. One, you have to give me the rhetoric. You have to explain to me, do this, don’t do that! Two, you have to understand me, why don’t I exercise, why don’t I stop drinking and so forth. Three, you need to offer support and motivation, right? If you just hand me a 12-step program and disappear, I’m not going to reach those goals. And four, you need a way to measure the new wellness, am I losing weight, am I drinking less?

These four things are really the foundations of our company: understanding a healthy daily routine, identifying unique health barriers, motivating and managing people’s progress and monitoring and measuring. These are outlined in ‘Get Balanced’, a wellness guide written by our Chief Medical Officer. ‘Transact’ is an online health profile, a series of 100 questions.

‘Get Balanced’ essentially defines for people what a healthy daily routine is. It’s very simple, very light, so to speak. So nutrition means eating well, at least three meals a day, a varied diet. Drink eight or more glasses of water. Sleep, you need to get seven to nine hours uninterrupted sleep, have a predictable bedtime and wake-up time. Physical activity, you have to get 20 minutes of vigorous exercise, or 60 minutes of activities, like walking, taking the steps instead of the elevator, that kind of thing. We wouldn’t force you to go to the gym, just get activity in your life. Mind-centring, participating in an activity like yoga, prayer, meditation, and paying attention to the activities of daily living, that means the personal hygiene, did you floss, did you brush, did you not work more than nine hours?

The second part, ‘Transact’ (an acronym for the words Temperament, Readiness, Attention and so on) asks questions. What you get back is a picture of yourself, and what barriers stand in the way of you living a healthy life. It might say, ‘well you tend to be a very disorganised person, so it’s hard to manage your time, you need to work on that, so you can build in time in your day to find time to exercise’, and so forth.

The third part, 'Health Manager', is our online wellness scale. This is the part where you stand on the scales and get the read-out! Basically, you tell the system what you’ve been up to. So here are the five things: what you’ve been eating, the physical activity, how much you’ve been moving around, how you managed your stress today, how you slept. And we give you a rating, our algorhythms take this information you give us and you get a health index, basically a read out.

If you keep these health index levels up to excellent, you will reach your health goals – you will lose weight, reduce stress, whatever. This is the heart of the system, but we also offer news and daily doses as you’re looking at the data, you can get helpful hints about sleep and mind-centring. And at the bottom of the screen, there’s an average of your last seven days – your ‘health history’.

We’re trying to give reflective information that people wouldn’t normally see. A view of their body. Because people wouldn’t normally see that, they’re so out of touch with their bodies, they can’t see. So you can click to get a view of your physical activity for a day. Now, this data is collected if you wear one of our health monitors. And what that’s doing is tracking the number of calories burnt – which indicates how much physical activity you’re getting throughout the day. The more you wear it, the more information you can get.

So what you’re looking at here is ‘I’m here sleeping, and then I wake up. Red is an aerobic activity like exercise’ and so forth. And that line there is my personal goal for the day. What that line is, is 15 per cent above your basal energy expenditure or your BEE. Your BEE is what you get for just sitting on the couch all day. It’s what you get for being and breathing and being alive. We set that up a little bit higher and it’s equivalent to getting that extra 20 minutes of exercise. You can also set it up here, let’s say you’re working with a personal trainer, a nutritionalist, and you can set it at 2600 calories burned a day, so you can reset and personalise that.

So this is very powerful information. You can also get a monthly view of the physical activity in your life. There’s that line, and I can see in one fell swoop that, nine days last month, I reached my targets. That’s very powerful information for me that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. And my investment in this system is very minimal. It takes me five minutes to enter my data every day. Or if I’m wearing this device, two minutes.

Now down below, the healthy exercise news and the exercise hints, that’s where we give you more information. If you’re having trouble exercising, you can click on these buttons here and this links to Screaming Media, we’ve partnered with them. And it’s already filtered for you, so it’s exercise news and physical activity hints written by our team of health experts.

This is a view of sleep. Sleep is very important and very often an overlooked attribute of a healthy daily routine. And what you’re looking at here, this is data coming off the body. This is body temp. Your body temp has a natural tendency to lower as you fall asleep. The shaded area is the time you said you went to bed. Down below is a motion monitor. You literally can see how restless you were last night, so you can see here I was sleeping well then around 5 o’clock I was moving around. I was up or I was startled by something. So if you’re feeling groggy today, you can look at this data and say that you had a restless sleep. Later on we’ll be able to look at exactly what time you fell asleep based on the primers we’re getting.

Now you’re probably wondering, ‘How the heck do I get all this information in here?’ Well there’s two ways essentially. One way is to enter it manually. How you do that is there’s this little button over here, called ‘enter your daily data’. So I select a time, then enter my nutrition in. I enter from 8am to 8:20, and you enter what food groups you had, a glass of milk, one of those Euromeat sandwiches you guys do here, I had two glasses of water and boom! we begin to give you a rating. If that’s all I ate today, that’s all I would get. Now as I enter more in later on for my lunch that will certainly go up. Sleep is the same. Click on sleep. I went to bed last night at 11:30pm, believe it or not. And I was up at 7:00am. I was pretty moderately rested last night. And I enter that in and it gives me a rating. And I could go on and on. That’s how you get data into the system.

To view information, you can click on ‘average’; and get your monthly average. If I click on the activities of daily living, for instance, and I look at a month view of activities of daily living, this gives you the percentage. That ‘worked less than nine hours’ is really powerful for me, this is a demo version, having used it for about a month now, I looked at that the other day and it said 12 per cent and I went, ‘Oh my God! I’ve got to get more balance in my life’, I didn’t realise I was working so hard. So again, we’re trying to give information to people. I could show you a lot more here, but I don’t want to run out of time and there’s a lot more I want to show.

Now, I know what’s on your mind now, you’re saying, ‘Look, that’s really not very objective. You’re relying on memory and people lie about what they’re doing and I’m not going to go to the site every day.’ It turns out some people will, for instance diabetics, they do keep a journal every day. In fact, that’s where the SenseWear monitor comes in. In fact, you wouldn’t know it, but I’m wearing a computer on my body right now. It’s right here, in the form of an armband. This is called our SenseWear Health Monitor, and basically how you upload your information is you go over here, click on ‘upload information,’ it’s wireless. And what that monitors automatically is sleep, (onset and quality), physical activity, (calories burned), and the amount of stress on your life.

And now I’m going to introduce one of the other co-founders, Chris Kasabach. He’s Head of SenseWear Development, so he's going to talk about that.

(Chris C)
Thanks, hi everybody, I’m going to talk briefly about the origins of Sensewear. Firstly, why an armband? We make a lot of maps at BodyMedia. We have a very diverse team, ranging from medical officers, to biomedical engineers, to clothes designers. So we have a very diverse group. We make a lot of maps, two in particular that I’d like to talk to you about.

The first is this sense map, a map of the body. We've worked on this the last two years in an industrial design process, but also a clinical process, trying to map all the places on the body where you can sense various parameters, for example, pulse and heart rate. So we've mapped all the places on the body where you can sense heart rate, even in a very faint way. EKG, this is another way of thinking about heart rate, it’s much more multi dimensional, where you basically take 12 leads, 12 different, very small sensors, put them on the body and you get a very multi-dimensional view of the heart. This basically maps all the different places on the body where you can sense that.

Temperature. You can see from this map that there are some places on the body that aren’t that great for wearing, yet you can get very good temperature readings! Heat flow. Heat flow is different from temperature, temperature is very simply how hot or cold the body is. Heat flow is the difference in temperature, coming off your skin, which correlates to your metabolic rate as well as the number of calories you’re burning. Galvanic skin response; this too is measuring a difference, it’s measuring the conductivity of your skin. Many psychologists use this as a biofeedback system. It’s clinically proven and used quite often where you’re basically measuring sweat and arousal level. And activity. So we’ve basically created these maps of understanding, where you can sense things on the body.

We had a centre at Carnegie Mellon University called the Center for Mobile and Wearable Computing. We did a lot of projects where we were working with clients who needed to carry information with them. You might be familiar with the Dreyfuss Charts, these are anthropometrical charts that map the body dimensionally. So if you’re designing a car, and you want to know where to put the gear shift, well you have to make sure that that it's going to accommodate 95 per cent of the population, male or female.

But this uses very static information and we were designing things for the body in motion, so we needed a new kind of map, and a new way of thinking about the body. What this image shows, and it’s very abstract, are these different locations of the body where you can actually wear something without restricting any movement, so in one sense it’s placement on the body, but it’s also how far off the body can it come? We have a natural aura, so when I walk I don’t want to brush against something, hitting a doorway if I have something coming off my arm. How small or large should a product be? How much weight can I carry? So we’re basically looking at this envelope of wear-ability.

Now, this gives a couple of examples of what these products look like on different body types, and how they respond to the environment. We’ve basically taken those two maps and put them together, so if you have a sensing map and a wearability map, and you’ve run these through a lot of different sorts of people, you see what's possible. So what we have now is this armband.

The way this small armband works is, it slides on and turns on by itself, just by the sweat of your skin. When it turns on, it calibrates and settles to your body, and then it begins sensing. You can wear the product for an hour, if you want to exercise, or a day, or for up to two weeks. You can take it off whenever you like. And when you show up at the website, you just hit a little button that says ‘see me’ and the information is sent to the site. We’ve made it very simple to use. Any interaction is straightforward. The analogy that we use for this product, is that it's like making a movie of you. The more you wear it, the more you understand about you. And as these pictures are being taken, you’re creating this live recording of you, and you go back to the site to develop yourself, to see how your body has played out over time.

(Chris P)

So how do we do all this? Well, we’re essentially four companies in one, that’s how we do it. We’re certainly a health awareness company, with a team of health experts, lifestyle consultants and a medical officer, as I mentioned. We have to know something about wearable computing, so we have a team of industrial designers, mechanical engineers, human factors folks that are all working together to do exactly the kind of research that Chris was just talking about. Of course, the dotcom stuff is all done in-house, so we have software engineers, interaction designers and information designers busy researching how to make this complex information useful for people.

One thing that you might not have realised yet is that we’re generating an incredible amount of valuable unseen data, so we have AI experts standing by to mine that data. We will have a year’s worth of sleeping habits, eating habits, exercise habits, real data coming off the body and no one’s ever seen that before. We’re setting up our relationships with research institutions around the United States to mine that data, so we can predict, ‘Hey! You’re going to have a cold if you keep this up!’ Will we be able to predict when you’re going have a heart attack? Probably not, but we’re going to be looking for that. We’re going to be looking at the different data points for useful information.

So ongoing research, quickly. Computer science: data mining for new predictabilities. Looking at new customs sensors. Smart textiles. Where else on the body can we begin to pick up body data. New bio-states, interpretation, ovulation, hydration. Wouldn’t you love to know, when you’re travelling, when you’re dehydrated, people don’t know when they’re dehydrated, then they get sick, we could tell you by looking at various bio-states and alert you, the thing will shake or so forth.

Health and medicine: we’re developing new tools for behaviour modification. New tools for risk assessments, for diabetes, fibro-myalgia, which is chronic pain, stress. So people can learn more about themselves by using the system. And then an online expert device called ‘problem solver’. If your sleep levels have been low over an extended period of time, we can pop something up on your screen that says, ‘Hey, Chris, we notice you haven’t been sleeping well and it’s been taking you a long time to fall asleep. Click here.’ And basically what you’d enter into is an interactive program to help you assess what the problem is and give you helpful hints like, ‘Hey, if you exercise in the evening, it helps you fall asleep because it raises your body temperature.’

Also we’re researching wearables and other forms of data entry: PDA’s, phones, waps.
We believe that technology should be used to craft new kinds of positive experience. At Body Media, we’re all experienced designers, trying to harness this great technology and put it into a context. We think we could change the way health care is done in the United States. Thank you very much for your time: if you’d like to visit us we’re at www.bodymedia.com