However, all these services have API:s and something I read in the Atlantic made me think of something I should do with all my data: make meaning of it! This is the part from the article:

One turning point will come when smartphone apps can automatically tailor their recommendations and feedback to an individual user’s behavior, just as a real-life behavior analyst would

Look at the diagrams in the beginning of this post. The blue one is my “fuels” (i.e physical activity) for the last three months, the red are my interactions on social media for the same period. There appears to be some sort of relationship between this two, right? Enter SPSS, a program for statistical analysis. With SPSS I can see if this relationship is statistically significant, so that we can make sure that it didn’t happen by coincidence. As you can see below there’s a strong correlation between “fuels” and “feeds” and also between “relaxed”, “awake” and “happiness”.

So this is of course super interesting to me. When I workout more I seem to be more active on social media — activity breeds activity. A relaxed Niklas also equals a more happy Niklas. All fun and well, but the next step, as David Freedman says in the article in the Atlantic, is to create automatical and tailored feedback and recommendations based on my data. Just a quick look at my experiment shows me what I should do more of if I want to feel better, be more social (on the Internet of course) or be more motivated to workout. It might look something like this:

/Niklas

Most of the time we tend to think of inspiration as some magical thing, that comes to us when we least expect it. You all know the eurekua moment, right? You’ve been thinking about something for way to long, and then suddenly it just pops into your head as something obvious.

Well, despite what some ancient greek dudes thought, inspiration is not a divine thing. Inspiration is just a new connection between old memories. This is why you often solve problems by just stop focusing on them. As you relax, you let your brain start to work on it’s own, and make it’s own connections – your eureka moments, your brilliant X-for-Y:s.

One great way of helping your brain though, is by providing more impressions for the brain to work with. Traveling is an awesome source for getting impressions, because it forces you to put yourself in situations you wouldn’t normally come by. At Hoa’s Tool Shop we try to travel as much as we can. Last year we spent a week in Berlin, two weeks in Israel, one week in San Francisco and one week in Barcelona. Traveling has been a great way for us to get out of our regular routine, getting new perspectives and learn new things things.

Helping people to use their cities to find inspiration was one of the reasons for building Streetheart, the app the got us invited to speak here today. Streetheart is kind of like Foursquare for street art, and the purpose is just to help people look at their own cities in new ways. Perhaps take another way home from work, or just to find new interesting areas they’ve never been to.

But, does the fact that Streetheart currently has a lot of spots posted in Prenzlauer Berg mean that the area has a lot of street art, or that there is a lot of art loving people in that area? And more importantly: for the purpose of finding inspiring places – does it really matter?

As you may see on the picture above we were mentioned in Die Welt, apparently we belong to the elite now :)

/Niklas

At Hoa’s Tool Shop we’re huge fans of tracking our daily lives. We use scales from Withings to measure our weights, readmill to track our reading habits, mappiness to monitor our feelings, nike plus to measure our exercises. Niklas even measures his blood pressure with a Withings device and his iPhone.

Well, we gather a lot of data and we’re not the only ones, most of these services have millions of users.

But, data is still just data. We quite often talk about the importance of actually making meaning of data, because data is only interesting when it’s put into a context. All of these services have their own way of visualizing it, but the real magic happens when you start to look at them together.

I started to correlate the data from Nike Fuelband (a pedometer for hipsters), with Twitter, and data from our own tool Viary (which is like Runkeeper for work related behaviors). A common excuse for not working out used to be that I was too swamped at work, there was simply no time.

But looking at the actual data told me the opposite: the days when I scored a lot Fuels on the Fuelband, was the same days that I tweeted the most, and performed best at work. This may not be relevant in a scientific way, but it’s still interesting to me.

It turns out the working out wasn’t stealing time from me, it was giving me more.

Correlating data from different sources is a very powerful tool, not only in personal development, but also when it comes to developing your product. In order to understand why things are working, or not working, you may have to look beyond your own product och data and look at the bigger picture.

Photo was taken by startup queen Paula Marttila.

Luckily for us there was a huge interest for psychology among the participants. Every day ended with a dance party and since both me and Oskar love to dance we decided to try a little psychological dance experiment.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Nike fuelband, a sort of glorified pedometer which tracks all your movements and turn them into “fuels”. Fuels is Nike’s own way of measuring physical activity, and 1500 fuels is roughly the same as 3500 steps or 400 calories. On the second club night at SSWC Oskar and I arranged a dance off together with the film producer Petter Karlsson from FKDV . Using our fuelsbands me and Oskar competed against each other to see who could reach 1500 fuels the fastest. Petter arranged so that all the other people on the dance floor could follow our race to 1500 fuels.

After 28 minutes on the dance floor I was declared the winner. Not only did this competition make me dance my ass off, it also created an awesome atmosphere on the dance floor. Since the other dancers could see our score they were able to cheer us on and motivate us to dance even harder.

Together with our sister company Psykologifabriken we’re trying to create smart and motivating ways which can help people reach their full potential. The experiment with the SSWC dance off was a fun way to translate some psychology to a new domain. Looking at the data you could say that the club could be a substitute for the gym.

/Niklas

I boiled down the function of a personal trainer to two simple features: 1) pushing me to go to the actual workout, and 2) setting concrete goals and making sure I move towards them.

I started working on the first goal by using Nike Fuelband which is a sort of pedometer that tracks all your movement. Nike has created their own unit called “fuels”, and 2000 fuels equals a semi-active day. You can choose how many fuels you want to hit in a day and then it’s up to you to reach that goal. In order to push myself I’ve set my goal really high. At first I set it at 3000 fuels but I’ve since raised it to 4000. If I want to reach that goal every day I have to push myself to walk more and to spend at least 30 minutes on some sort of physical activity every day.

I love working towards something concrete, and that’s why I love entering races. So far I have completed six races in the last two years and knowing that I’ll soon be running in a race is a great motivator for me. My next race is the midnight run in Stockholm. It’s 10 kilometers and I believe that I could get an ok time as long as I prepare myself well. To make sure I stay on track and continue to strive towards my goals I’ve created two goals in Viary:

- Run 2 kilometers under 7 minutes
- Complete the Midnight Run in less than 40 minutes

I hope to hit the first goal after performing the behavior “Run 2 kilometers as fast as possible” five times. With Viary I can keep track of my progression by using the commenting system in the app. In my first try I ran it in 7:29 minutes, then two weeks later I tried it again, this time completing it in 7:19 minutes. Just by logging my runs and seeing how each little run takes me closer to my goal is not only a great motivator, it’s also a great way to know how much I can push myself. I’ve set up something similar for the second goal but the results so far don’t look as good as they do regarding the first goal.

I know that a personal trainer does so much more than seting goals and reminding you to increase them. In fact I love these types of services so much that I’m working on a site that’s sort of a Air Bnb for personal trainers. The point is that they’re expensive and that you can come a long way by breaking down goals into concrete behaviors and then visualize how those behaviors affect the goal.

/Niklas

We at Hoa’s Tool Shop and Psykologifabriken want to give a huge thank you to all our partners, speakers and contestants. Our aim with Health Hack Day has been to show the world the potential in health hacking and creating digital health services. If we once again have a look at the statistics I’m comfortable in saying that we succeeded. During the weekend we got 110 pictures on instagram with the hashtag hhd12. There were a total of 466 unique mentions of #hhd12 and @healthhackday on twitter and so far I’ve been interviewed by three nationwide radio stations, Sweden’s biggest newspaper and three health/tech magazines.

I hope all this didn’t sound too boastful, what I’m trying to say is that we are extremely proud and that it wouldn’t have been such a success if it weren’t for all the people putting their time and passion into Health Hack Day. The next Health Hack Day won’t be in Stockholm or even in Sweden. Just like one of our sources of inspiration, Music Hack Day, Health Hack Day is a world wide event. I’m already speaking to some future organizers but if you love health and tech and want to channel your passion towards creating an event, please don’t hesitate to send an email to niklas at hoastoolshop.com

If you haven’t seen it yet I recommend you to have a look at the price ceremony and the pitch from our winners Line HQ

Tell us how you came to open up your own roasting house!

– The short version is that I suggested to Johan that we should go to India and visit coffee plantations, to learn more about how the production works from start. While we were there, we talked a lot about the coffee that is served today, and how our restaurant experiences are always destroyed by that last, bitter cup of coffee. There and then, we unconsciously decided to start a big roasting house some time in the future. One year later, we had made the idea come true.

What is really good coffee to you? And what are your advice to those who really want to make good coffee at home?

– To us, a really good coffee is when we finally, after months of hard work, f.find the right coffee, brew it to perfection and find the right grinding for it. That is good coffee!

– To make good coffee at home you basically just need to get a coffee grinder, use freshly roasted coffee and grind it just before brewing.

How does coffee affect your health?

– For some people, coffee can increase blood pressure and lead to headaches and dehydration (but the last one is only if you overdose it). But aside from that, research has shown that coffee contains incredible amounts of anti-oxidants. This, combined with the up to 1,000 unique combinations of substances in coffee, might reduce the risk of several diseases and conditions, including stroke and infection.
– During the last 50 years, scientists have thought the opposite – that coffee and caffeine was dangerous. However, it is important to point out that ecological coffee grown without pesticides is far better. I think you understand the point if I just say DDT!

How did you like serving coffee at Health Hack Day?

– Serving coffee at HHD12 has been very rewarding. We have met a lot of interesting programmers, students and entrepreneurs. We got a lot of good feedback and it has been an honor to be here in Hoa’s beautiful locales. It has been truly inspiring. We have a feeling we will see each other again soon!

/Kajsa

At first I want to congratulate the winners who created Piddle! Our runner up, Snapp, was also a brilliant idea and the same goes for our third place, team Shape Up.

What Oskar forgot to mention was all the great talks and interviews that were happening during the weekend. Luckily we hired the best film crew money can buy, FDKV, and all the talks are now up on youtube. Here are my favorites:

1. The Gosta Glasses by Sofia Svantesson. This award winning entrepreneur and innovator gave us a demo of a truly mind blowing sports product, the Gosta glasses. I liked this presentation because the idea solves a problem, there was a dramatic build up and the fact that this is a service I would really need.

2. The panel discussion. How often do you have three power players from three power companies in the same room? Oskar did a great job interviewing Megan Miller from Bonnier, Bill Day from Runkeeper and Francesco Bertiato from Technogym. It was really interesting to hear three different views on health and what gets people motivated. Oskar was a great host, and I never expected that the idea of building a service based on some of the seven deadly sins would come up as a topic!

3. Last but not least I enjoyed this interview with John Sjölander, the COO of Burt. John is all about business, which I love, and he gives you some great insights on trends, what a consumer is, the future of health and how to build a great team.

I’m also a bit disappointed that Oskar didn’t mention all the stuff that put a silver lining around Health Hack Day. I’m talking about the barristas from Stockholm roast, the coolest DJ-trio in the world — Euphoric Felines , our champagne pyramid and our beautifully designed ceiling. Luckily all of this is documented and availabale on Instagram!.

Tell us what you do at Burt!

– I started out as CTO in the founding team, but have since transitioned into becoming the COO. As COO I’m responsible for the internal organization: How we’re structured, who reports to whom, what resources our teams require, what resources are available to them, what processes they should they use, the planning of future staffing, opening external offices, recruiting the very best talent, company partnerships – the list goes on. One way to see it is that I make sure the company is capable of doing what our CEO wants us to do.

The purpose of Health Hack Day is to promote the exciting field of digital tools for health. As a startup veteran, what do you think about the business potential of this area?

– “Startup veteran” – thank you, that is too flattering. I actually think the area of digital tools to help with health issues, especially consumerized products, still hasn’t reached its full potential, and in some cases is even underestimated.
– When it comes to thinking creatively about a market opportunity, I sometimes use an easy exercise: Do I envision that people will use more “stuff” to work out, say, 20 years from now? Do I imagine that that stuff will be common, sophisticated, used by a vast majority, etcetera?  In this case I think the answer is easy: Yes. It’s not very hard imagining a Siri-esque personal fitness trainer in your pocket – getting you access to various fitness programs, diets, analyzing your daily behaviour, where you spend your time, what you do, to give you personalized recommendations.
– And that’s only workout, which is only a small part of health. Why wouldn’t the device replace the gym membership? It could easily give you instructions for a full work out.

One of the challenges when it comes to digital tools, mobile apps not least, is to find a sustainable business model – where should the money come from. What is your view on this?

– Wow, broad question to say the least. Yes, you need to make money. No I can’t tell you exactly how. But here are some thoughts:

1) Have an IDEA that you can make money by doing something smart. Preferably a few ideas.
1b) If your idea is to use advertising you’re going to fail. Or at least not be super successful.
2) Test your ideas by bouncing them off people when you’re showing them your app.
3) The value of building a huge user base is likely very small. On a totally other note, I believe strongly that there is a bubble going on right now, but the bubble is about what a “consumer” is actually worth to a company. So instead of thinking “if I get tons of users Facebook will buy me” (which is stupid, they won’t) make sure you actually build revenues in some way. May it be lead generation, sponsorships, a paid app, subscriptions, paying for premium features, selling your data to a third party…

Do you use any digital health tools yourself? Is there any health tool you would like to see on the market that doesn’t exist today?

– I use runkeeper and it has changed my life. I absolutely love it! As a highly competitive geek, it gives me a chance to compete with myself, far beyond what I’ve been able to do before.
– I don’t have a specific idea on what should be built, but a fun thing to do is to think about stuff within a market – in this case health – that people hate. Ok, so people love working out, but most of us think that gym memberships that go on and on, are super expensive and lock me in are aweful. Perhaps there’s a way to solve that? Or, people hate that diets don’t really seem to work. Change that? Or people hate that it’s hard to know if stuff in food is good or unhealthy. Can we solve that? That is sometimes a good way to find a place that needs change.

You started out as a programmer but you also seem to have an interest in organizational processes. What advice would you give startups in the health tech area; how should you build your organization to maximize your chances of succeeding?

– Don’t build your organization. Hire is the last thing you want to do. Money and people will not solve your issues – but teamwork will. So make sure you hire ONLY when you need it, and then work hard as hell on your problem, with a highly passionate team. It’s really that simple, but it’s also really that hard. But at some point, you’re going to have to. I get that. And I really can’t tell anyone how they should build their organization, because that’s like telling someone how they should dress. It has to do with taste, preferences, ability, opportunity and so on.
– But do think hard about how you want to organize yourself. Do you really need a marketer as employee number six? Always think about what you could do if you made a different choice. Question constantly how you work, if you’re at your full potential, if every skill you have or think you need is absolutely necessary, etcetera. And try lot’s of different stuff.
– But all that is far down the road. It’s not until you’re 10-12 people that you can even see the effects of doing organizational changes.

Did they jury make the right decision? You find all the demos here and our price ceremony here.
/Kajsa