#quantifying kids

When you search “quantified self and kids”, the first hit is a video of Bill Schuller presenting on his experience introducing self-tracking technology to his family, namely his 5 year-old son, Luka. Other than being a husband and a father of two, Schuller is an Enterprise Architect for Intuit who has been quantifying himself since late 2009. While Intuit makes TurboTax and QuickBooks, Bill maintains he has no idea how to help you file your taxes or fix your payroll, but we thought he was the perfect, first-hand, self-tracking experimenter to begin the Incomparable Things blog. Bill serves as organizer for the DFW Quantified Self meet up group. Please also check out his blog: http://www.dataobsessive.com/

 IT: How did you get involved in Quantified Self?

 BS: My personal passion with quantified self (QS) developed around correlation and casualty domains. My untested hypothesis is, "data collected across a broad spectrum of related domains will result in exponentially more value than the discrete data in isolation". This naturally led to a desire to collect data as broadly as I could, tempered by the fact that I was a very engaged father to two young children and a very engaged engineer at a large software company. Though I knew I would not have the time to build a tool that brought the myriad of data together, I recognized that while unanalyzed data could be analyzed in years to come, uncollected data couldn’t be collected at a later date. I made a decision to track everything that I could, deferring any analysis until later. However, I have found over time that without being able to see the true return on the data, the motivation to collect has waned. I now track fewer things than I used to.

 IT: What inspired you to begin quantifying Luka's [5yo boy] fitness? What was his curiosity in your own QS pursuits leading up to you giving him a fitbit?

 BS: Reflection on my own QS journey led me to ask myself what it would be like if I had been collecting this information my whole life. Would I be able to clearly see what led me to become less than healthy in my early thirties? Would I have been able to correct early-and-often leading me to a life I could more fully enjoy? It was not a great leap to realize that while it was too late for me to start early, it was not too late for my kids.

 IT: What factors do you attribute to your son’s enthusiasm for quantifying his fitness? Similarly, what do you think will contribute to his ongoing engagement?

 BS: My son has a competitive nature; he is very strictly interested in winning. Since none of his friends have a fitbit, I think it gives him a stronger self-assessed social standing having this device that only “grown-ups” have. The device is a responsibility and he feels more responsible with it. As a kid, fun goes a very long way. There are all sorts of games he and I have invented to "get more steps". The purest form is simply running around the house like an olympic sprinter. It is still hilarious to see him look up from his fitbit and state to no one in particular "I have to get more steps" and then speed off for a few laps around the living room. Unfortunately this check sometimes occurs on his way to bed at night in an attempt to close a close gap.

 Enter Bruce, whom Luka refers to as, "Bruce from your work". Bruce is a great guy that I've worked with for over 10 years at Intuit. Bruce heard about my experience with fitbit in the context of some challenges folks were having with our employer-sponsored Virgin HealthMiles pedometer program. He bought a fitbit and we connected through the fitbit cloud service. As a result, Bruce showed up on my fitbit leaderboard usually “losing” to Luka. Luka could not have been more pleased to be "winning" against a real grownup; and not just a regular grownup, a "from your work" grownup. I think that Luka may have been keeping better track of Bruce’s steps that Bruce was himself for a while there.

IT: In a perfect parenting future, what self-tracking device would Luka have? What is the most valuable data to a parent?

 BS: The device would require the absolute minimum engagement to affect appropriate behavior change. I don't want my children or I to be led into engaging with any product unnecessarily. This obviously flies in the face of the age of Facebook where engagement is for sale. My child should be engaged proactively at appropriate times, in the appropriate context, in ways that are specifically reviewed and authorized by me, the parent. Children must follow school rules and deal with unique social situations and family contexts.  Products should allow parent-specified controls over where and when proactive and even reactive engagement is permitted. This means not sending a motivation to move in the middle of class and not suggesting a healthy snack in the middle of dinner.

 These devices must also be completely unobtrusive. Charging, docking, syncing, checking and particularly any manual entry are all value detractors. There is no incremental value other than continued use of the product. In a perfect world, so the user doesn't have to remember to put it on, the device shouldn't have to be removed either.

 For me the most value will come from the rules run against the data to inform me of potential issues or suggest that I engage with my children on some insight uncovered in the data. I want to be able to author those rules and share and consume rules others have authored. 

 IT: In an interview with philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, editor Megan Erickson describes measuring human experiences in terms of self-improvement as, “terrifying, it suggests an overwhelming impulse to quantify the unquantifiable, to accrue life's moments like capital rather than to experience awareness in a physical or emotional sense.” What things, if any, do you think are at risk when we quantify children’s lives? What can we do as parents, technologists and designers to prevent that?

 BS: I ride a mountain bike on occasion. I enjoy that experience as it is happening without paying attention to the fact that my cadence, distance, GPS coordinates, heart rate, pictures and even the music I listen to, are being tracked. When I am done with my ride and I've drunk in the endorphins, I have a second experience full of passion to explore: the data. I don't reduce that experience to data. The data enhances the experience by allowing me to see aspects of the ride in the context of similar experiences. As I compare the last ride, I remember the biting wind and explore how temperature and wind speed affect my ride. I ride faster in the cold, by the way.

 It can be easy to get lost in the numbers. I've been there. One day while listening to music in the shower dancing along a bit, I suddenly froze. I stopped moving because I didn't have my fitbit on. I experienced a genuine sense of loss. There was data going uncollected! My conscious mind chose to minimize the loss by generating as little data as possible. It completely stole what otherwise would have continued as a simple, health promoting, positive experience. I wish I could say that was the end of it. However, I picked up a waterproof heart rate monitor from Suunto and soon wore it in the shower and swimming pool a few times. Even in the moment I recognized that this line of thinking was ridiculous to me. I let my unquenchable thirst to collect data win out for a bit though. I eventually dropped most manual tracking efforts. Soon thereafter, the process of docking the heart rate monitor and syncing it with a PC was deemed too much hassle as well.

 Self-reflection is a powerful tool. As a philosopher, Žižek is a champion of reflecting on both the individual self and society as self. It is something that is not part of today's curriculum for children. I see quantification as a way to help enable self-reflection. I believe that it is safe to start self-reflection once a child understands the concept of self. How long have parents been marking children's growth on a doorframe and tracking the number of words their young child speaks to compare to developmental norms? A child's performance in the educational system is quantified at every step of the way. The difference in what I am doing is increasing the fidelity, increasing the time horizon, drawing correlation between the data and teaching my children to look at the results and reflect on them.