BodyTrack: Open Source Tools for Health Empowerment through Self-Tracking

October 22, 2012
Anne Wright | Carnegie Mellon University

The BodyTrack project develops open source tools to aggregate and visualize self-tracking data from a variety of sources. We seek to empower individuals to explore how various factors affect them, such as evaluating potential food sensitivities, asthma or migraine triggers, or other environment/health interactions.

This talk will discuss our motivations and design goals in developing these tools, demonstrate the current state of this work, and share what we have learned through working with people exploring aspects of their health through self-tracking. Lessons learned include the importance of making disparate data sources fluidly explorable on a common timeline and developing a culture of and social supports for this type of self-tracking.

Speaker Details

Anne Wright is Co-principal Investigator and Director of Operations for the BodyTrack project in the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. She received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. After leaving MIT, she co-founded Newton Research Labs, a successful robotics and computer vision company, then joined the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames Research Center where she served as Lead Systems Engineer for Prototype Mars Rovers. While at Ames, Anne became interested in how to harness sensing and data visualization technologies and techniques originally developed for the rovers to help people “debug” diffuse environmentally related conditions such as allergies, food sensitivities, asthma and migraine triggers, etc. She moved to Pittsburgh in 2009 and spent a year studying biochemistry at CMU. She co-founded the BodyTrack Project in 2010 with the support of the Heinz Endowments of Pittsburgh. Through the BodyTrack Project she pursues a multi-faceted approach to improving health empowerment for people affected by such diffuse conditions, including open-source technology development, aggregation and visualization of data from existing devices and data sources, collaborative development of common data interchange formats and APIs, development of custom devices, and cultural engineering. She also seeks to identify and catalyze synergistic efforts in this space such as the Quantified Self, Quant Friendly Doctor, and open mHealth movements.