Lifestyle  >  Getting to know you

Will analysing your own data help make you more efficient or lead a more productive and enjoyable life? Olivia Solon enters the fascinating, if slightly scary, world of self-hacking.

Wherever we go, we leave a tantalising ‘breadcrumb trail' of data in our wake. The combination of carrying around a personal tracking device – our mobile phone – and the migration of tools and services online means, whether we like it or not, we're generating data with every interaction. Our spending habits, our location, our running patterns, the number of friends we have on social networking sites – all of these contribute to this digital residue.

And now a new breed of easy-to-use analysis tools is springing up to allow us to take control of, aggregate and make sense of the data we generate.

On a very simple level, self-hacking can be about using an app such as RunKeeper, which uses GPS to plot how far you run and allows you to compare your performance to previous days. However, it becomes more interesting when you pull in multiple data streams across different areas of your life.

That's where personal analytics platform Tictrac comes in – it lets you include data from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Foursquare, LinkedIn, RunKeeper, Withings wi-fi-enabled weighing scales, Fitbit, sleep monitors, calendars – even the weather – into a single dashboard, helping you identify trends so that you might make better life decisions.

Founder and CEO of Tictrac, Martin Blinder, says: “We believe there's value in providing people with a dashboard of their ‘current state of affairs' – a single place where they can review the latest stats about their different online activities, from check-ins to email, their current weight to today's lunch spend. By just having one's activity data in one place, users can immediately understand how they are doing at any given time.”

One example might be comparing your running patterns to your work diary and your weight (as measured by your wi-fi scales). While it might be obvious that if you eat too much and move too little you'll fill out a bit, Tictrac lets you track down which factor could be causing the weight gain. It might turn out that even though you're running more than normal, you've put on weight because you've been to more business lunches than usual. Another example might be comparing your blood pressure to the number of emails you receive and meetings you have, or your home energy use to your sleeping patterns.

As Blinder explains: “We believe users can uncover more about themselves by crossing this data. They can also learn how ancillary information, such as the weather and seasons, affect their behaviour or mood.”

Practical uses

Health and fitness seem to be driving the self-hacking agenda, especially as it's an area in which we're used to counting calories, reps and heart rate, and using pedometers. It is somewhat hamstrung, however, by the fact that one of the primary measures in this sphere – the food intake – still requires manual input. Until we can implant a chip in our mouths or stomachs that continually monitors what we consume it will be a bit of a hassle to get the full picture. There is technology that can help, for example the iPhone app Meal Snap, which can identify food items from a photo of their meal and estimate calorie content.

However, a burgeoning area for selfhacking – or, should we say, self-hacking by proxy – is child development. Parents can now buy baby monitors that count how many times a baby cries and for how long. This data can be compared to the size, weight and age of the child and the illnesses it gets. However, it could pave the way for a somewhat terrifying future of pushy parenting, where mums and dads can pit their children against each other in terms or academic or athletic performance.

This level of data analysis can also be useful in the commercial space with ‘one-to-many' relationships, such as doctors and their patients, teachers and students and parents and children. Furthermore it can be used by consumer brands as a means of market research. Part of Tictrac's business model is to have companies pay people to monitor certain parts of their lives, and so harness the platform as a distributed market research panel.

There are, however, a number of potential challenges for self-hacking. The first is that we humans aren't entirely rational, and won't always make lifestyle decisions based upon statistics – no matter how compelling.

A more major concern is privacy. A single online store for all of this personal data could be enormously valuable not only to companies, but to more unscrupulous people who could capitalise on the knowledge of your exact location and lifestyle patterns. For this reason the encryption and management of this data is of great importance. Many self-hackers like the idea of a personal data store housing all the data you generate on the web, combined with a personal Application Programming Interface. An API is a set of digital building blocks used by companies seeking to keep ownership of their data while allowing others to access it and build tools and services on top of it.

Theoretically, this sort of platform could allow us to retain control over our personal data and give different organisations different permissions to use it. For example, you might be willing to trade your sleeping-pattern data for a fee with a bed manufacturer, but not your age, weight or eating habits. Currently, a comprehensive permissions-based system does not exist, although it is the subject of research at Stanford, Nottingham and Cambridge universities.

Once we claw back our data from large organisations, there is a possibility that we could turn it to our financial advantage. As Derek McAuley, Professor of Digital Economy at the University of Nottingham, says: “Cloud service providers such as Google mine data for value. The question remains as to whether the consumer is getting good value. Perhaps Google should pay me $25 a month to host my email because of the value they extract.”