Chris Roth — cofounder DoubleBlinded — on taking a scientific aproach to life
By: Arjan Haring
Tags: Health, Quality Of Life, Quantified Self

Chris is a software engineer turned data scientist with a specialization in health, biotech, and science. He is interested in quality of life improvement both at the individual level through lifestyle design and at the macro level through urban planning and public policy. In addition to software and tech, he studies, health, biology, and nutrition.

He is a cofounder of DoubleBlinded, an experimental new platform for personal experimentation and crowdsourced science.

Could you refresh everyone’s mind and tell us what the Quantified Self movement is all about?

I’ll give you the “official” definition as Wikipedia defines it, for starters:

The Quantified Self (QS) is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).

It’s hard to beat that definition, so I’ll elaborate on what parts of that I think are the most profound…

To me, QS is about taking a scientific approach to your life. Instead of just assuming that your intuitions are correct, QS is about taking your intuitions and validating them with numbers so that you can track pieces of your life with scientific certainty. This gives you the tools to fine-tune your life and detect progress or regressions that might otherwise slip under your radar.

Here’s an example: as you age, your hormones change. Generally a man’s testosterone levels slowly decrease after age 30 by about 1% each year. This happens gradually… most men don’t notice. If you are able to quantify your blood hormones, then you can notice the slow decline and intervene. Perhaps this is a natural, healthy trend, but some of the negative effects like low energy, low libido, and brain fog can be ameliorated with interventions such as TRT, supplementation, and weight lifting. Once you’ve intervened, you’ll want to see if your intervention is actually working… with another hormone test. This gives you the tools to definitively know if what you are doing is working.

The way that media portrays the QS movement, you’d think it was a super esoteric movement full of health nerds. I believe it is part of a much larger movement about quantifying the world in general. As technology advances and we have better tools for measuring our bodies, we make use of those tools and react to the measurements that we gain. This is nothing new… hormone tests, for example, have been around long before the term “Quantified Self” existed. The movement is simply a new term describing the recent popularization of self-measurement which has emerged as a result of cheaper, more accurate measurement tools.

Logging data, by itself, doesn’t really tell you a lot. It makes for a really cool time-lapse-video (and they are often cool), but if one has the goal to improve for example his/her health than you have to do more than logging, right? What are your ideas on that?

You touch on an interesting distinction. The QS community is made up of people from a lot of different backgrounds, each having very different motivations, but I think the community can generally be divided into two camps: those who are intrinsically motivated as hobbyists and those who are trying to solve health problems.

For the intrinsically motivated crowd, logging is much like journaling: it’s self-satisfying and doesn’t need to solve any particular problem. It’s simply for fun and enjoyment. In that respect, I find that a lot of QS projects are actually artwork, and I think this is one of the most beautiful things about the movement. We’re seeing a merging of artwork, technology, and mathematics in a way that wasn’t possible before. I can certainly say that I enjoy this aspect of QS myself. I would self-log regardless of the outcome, even if it were just for fun.

Then there are the health-motivated folks. The diabetes community, for example, is very present in the QS world because of the nature of their condition. The diabetes community is an interesting area of study for grassroots innovation in general. I was recently at a conference hosted by Dr. Harold DeMonaco and Eric von Hippel of MIT who study patient-led innovation. A lot of the people in this community self-track not just for fun, but to manage their diabetes.

And another health area that is ripe for this kind of quantification-based improvement is mental health. Bipolar, for example, is a disease that really needs to be tracked: manic episodes and depressive episodes need to be monitored in order to identify triggers. And the same goes with migraines, too… there are an increasing number of mobile apps out there that use self-logging as a tool to try to identify potential triggers such as citrus fruit or brightly-lit screens.

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