February 19, 2010
The past week has been filled with travel, moving from working at Great Basin Outdoor School in Lake Tahoe to living in Medford, Oregon, with a dose of Santa Cruz sunshine in between. There has been no shortage of time spent thinking and talking about the PCT and as the time draws nearer the excitement grows . This post is intended to piggy-back our previous due to the short amount of time spent writing. Along the trail with Bo we discussed the possibility of doing research as well on our hike. Bo is a grad student at UC Santa Cruz, as well as a researcher at Fujitsu Labs of America. He told us all about his fascinating work with consumer medical sensors and how more and more people are using these devices to quantitatively measure themselves, not solely to diagnose illness (Bo started working with this program due to sleep apnea), but rather, to understand how their body functions when healthy. Doctors know little about how our bodies function when healthy because patients rarely come in and say “hey doc, I’m perfectly fine – check it out!” This data is being gathered so that we can one day understand the healthy human body functions. Check out corporations like Nike+ which encourages and motivates people to track their lifestyle and work on their health.
That got us to wondering… is their anything we could measure that would be interesting to our supporters? Some obvious ideas are measuring how many footsteps we take on the PCT, how our fitness level changes during different parts of the trip, how are resting heart rate changes while sleeping outside versus indoors, the list goes on and on.
What do you think? An experience this big is bound to change a person, and we’d love to hear other suggestions in the comments for things that might be fun to measure or think about.
~ Justin & Melissa
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