Most people today are finding ways to stay active and healthy. Although everyone knows it’s best to.

Most people
today are finding ways to stay active and healthy. Although everyone knows it’s
best to follow a healthy lifestyle, people often lack the motivation needed to
keep them on track. 100Plus, a start-up company, has developed a personalized,
mobile prediction platform called Outside that keeps users active. The
application is based on the quantified self-approach, which makes use of
technology to self-track the data on a person’s habits, analyze it, and make
personalized recommendations. 100 Plus posited that people are most likely to
succeed in changing their lifestyles when they
»

Most people
today are finding ways to stay active and healthy. Although everyone knows it’s
best to follow a healthy lifestyle, people often lack the motivation needed to
keep them on track. 100Plus, a start-up company, has developed a personalized,
mobile prediction platform called Outside that keeps users active. The
application is based on the quantified self-approach, which makes use of
technology to self-track the data on a person’s habits, analyze it, and make
personalized recommendations. 100 Plus posited that people are most likely to
succeed in changing their lifestyles when they are given small, micro goals
that are easier to achieve. They built Outside as a personalized product that
engages people in these activities and enables them to understand the long-term
impacts of short-term activities. After the user enters basic data such as
gender, age, weight, height, and the location where he or she lives, a behavior
profile is built and compared with data from Practice Fusion and CDC records. A
life score is calculated using predictive analytics. This score gives the
estimated life expectancy of the user. Once registered, users can begin
discovering health opportunities, which are categorized as “missions” on the
mobile interface. These missions are specific to the places based on the user’s
location. Users can track activities, complete them, and get a score that is
credited back to a life score. Outside also enables its users to create
diverse, personalized suggestions by keeping track of photographs of them doing
each activity. These can be used for suggestions to others, based on their
location and preferences. A leader board allows a particular user to find how
other people with similar characteristics are completing their missions and
inspires the current user to resort to healthier living. In that sense it also
combines social media with predictive analytics. Today, most smartphones are
equipped with accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure jerk, orientation, and
sense motion. Many applications use this data to make the user’s experience on
the smartphone better. Data on accelerometer and gyroscope readings is publicly
available and can be used to classify various activities like walking, running,
lying down, and climbing. Kaggle (kaggle.com), a platform that hosts
competitions and research for predictive modeling and analytics, recently
hosted a competition aimed at identifying muscle motions that may be used to
predict the progression of Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is caused
by a failure in the central nervous system, which leads to tremors, rigidity,
slowness of movement, and postural instability. The objective of the
competition is to best identify markers that can lead to predicting the
progression of the disease. This particular application of advanced technology
and analytics is an example of how these two can come together to generate
extremely useful and relevant information.

1. Search
online for other applications of consumer oriented analytical applications.

2. How can
location-based analytics help individual consumers?

3. How can
smart phone data be used to predict medical conditions?

4. How is
Park PGH different from a “parking space– reporting” app?

»