We held our first community call on December 10th – many thanks to the attendees and invited presenters, Karolina Alexiou and Rogier Koning! Future community calls will be held on the second Tuesday of each month.

Interested in attending on January 14? You can add the Google calendar event and visit our ongoing agenda & notes document to get information about joining the call.

Invited guest: Rogier Koning, Nobism, and Cluster Headaches

Rogier shared the Nobism app and data source in Open Humans, which he created to track symptoms, potential triggers, and treatments. Cluster headaches are one of the most painful things people can experience – they’re called “suicide headaches” – and patients understandably want to understand how to anticipate and reduce their own symptoms!

Rogier’s reports showed compelling visualizations produced with the Ubiqum project, which members can share their data with – illustrating how headaches occur over the course of months, at different times of the day – different individuals had different patterns for what time headaches were likely to occur. The effect of medications could be clearly seen in the patterns on the graphs!

One of our long-time community members, Ben Carr, noted he’s also a cluster headache patient, and reflected on his use of the app! He reflected on potential improvements and hadn’t realized he could also join the accompanying Ubiqum project. (Showing us there’s a potential need for prompting people!) Rogier also explained that the app isn’t limited to cluster headaches, and he’d welcome other chronic disease patients using it for new purposes.

Rogier has plans to expand community aspects of his work, and hopes to share more in the future!

Invited guest: Karolina Alexiou and GitHub data import

Karolina presented one of our latest data source additions, which might especially be of interest for programmers. Her GitHub data import gets all data on contributions made to (open source) code projects on GitHub, giving members a view of to which projects they contribute and when & how much they program.

In addition to the data import itself, Karolina demonstrated how this data can be visualized and what can be learned from it, by running a Personal Data Notebook on her own data. This notebook is already publicly available, so if you are using GitHub and want to give it a try, you can start right away.

Data Types & Uploading files

Mad & Bastian shared some ongoing work on the Open Humans end. While data sets are currently organized by the data source that has uploaded them, this sometimes makes sharing the data complex. Either because multiple projects upload the same or very similar data types (e.g. genetic data from different sources), or because a single data source uploads multiple kinds of data (e.g. activity tracking data that contains both step counts and GPS records). As Ben Carr noticed on the call, this can make granular sharing hard.

To adjust for this, Mad has been working on a data type system, which allows individual data files be classified according to the kind of data in them, instead of just relying on the source. They presented a new uploader tool for Open Humans, that can assign the data type to each file upload. Based on this, Bastian presented how this data can be used to upload environmental noise data, as recorded from an Apple Watch and how it can be explored through a Personal Data Notebook. One thing Bastian learned was that some of his noisiest times were at home; when he looked into it more closely, it was when he was in the shower!

Further discussions

Additionally, the participants of the community call discussed their experiences with tracking blood sugar through Continuous Glucose Monitors, how to make the Personal Data Notebooks more user friendly and whether it is possible to allow access to data without sharing the data sets themselves by allowing analyses being run in the cloud. Exchanging community member experiences and what they are working on was inspiring.

If you want to participate in the next community call please see our Community Call information & notes document for event details, it will be 14th of January at 10am PST / 6pm GMT.