For those new to the idea, Quantified Self is a forum for users and tool makers to interact and share knowledge, experiences, tips & tricks to enable better self discovery through tracking. The Seattle chapter of this forum is managed by great folks at Habitlabs (Buster & Amelia) and Limeade (David).

With over 20 people joining the conversation it was great to see energy in self-tracking and self-improvement. Most people seem to share the problem of not knowing what to do with the data they have. It was interesting to see Amelia to talk about positive effect of just tacking a 10-day running average of her weight. Robby gave a great presentation on his month long project to track transportation costs, and the conclusion to use a bicycle.

I’m looking forward to hear more this community. I have been trying to use HealthVault PowerShell and excel with power-pivot to track and visualize few properties of Health data.

In addition to the application ideas on the contest website feel free to use the resources from Health hack-a-thons. Perhaps it will be great to see some mash-ups using data from http://www.data.gov/health.

Drop me a note if you need help connecting your mobile applications with HealthVault or are trying to explore the Health datasets.

Update: If you want to take your project to the next level, RockHealth might have some seed funding for you!

If you are planning to attend the conference do drop me a note, and perhaps some check-out my talk. I’m also looking for audience for dry-runs of my talk..

• Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Studio – I love the free tools provided to develop for Windows Phone. Love the fact that Silverlight and XNA studio are very thoughtfully and seamlessly working with-in Visual Studio Express. The developer studio is lean and performant, its great to see the tool tips for Pixel widths right in the design surface. I was able to write a simple Health app in about 10 mins, the Phones are not out yet but the

• Open Data Protocol : Very interesting competition to GData . OData – http://www.odata.org/ is a combination of AtomPub with data-typing and querying conventions. OData is supported out of the box by Windows Azure services, and Netflix launch an API powered by OData – http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/. It will be great to learn more about batching and syncing aspects of this protocol (Interestingly Microsoft Sync Platform also launched an asymmetric syncing capability).
• Data Relay : MySpace which is the largest .NET site open sourced their middle-tier GU – http://datarelay.codeplex.com/. DataRelay has a framework for message passing, transaction management on top of a performant caching system. Apparently it uses The CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) from Microsoft Robotic Studio .
• A very interesting presentation of building your own MVVM framework – I love the use of Continuations and a programming model where the framework takes care of concurrency and events! The presenter is author of Caliburn – http://www.codeplex.com/caliburn.
• Font-ing it out – For a font newbie like me, all i know about Fonts I learnt from Kevin Larsons presentation : http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/DS07 

Twitter hashtag for mix is #mix10 and session recordings are available at http://live.visitmix.com

Understanding Health IT Standards
In April I started a series which aims at helping a programmer understand Health IT standards. I aim to develop this series further in 2010 and I’m also working on a compilation of essays on Health IT, you are encouraged to provide feedback here.

The series so far talks about Vocabularies, HealthVault Data Types in context of various Health IT Standards, SNOMED-CT, CCR.

WalkMe
I started the year with posting about WalkMe, and followed in July with a detailed post about data syncing architecture of this application. This simple walking application is now tracking over 2 million steps! If you want to add a live pedometer signature to your outlook e-mail follow this post. Future features and development of this application is primarily driven by user feedback.

HealthVault Applications using ASP.NET MVC and on Windows Azure
In July I did a post showing how one use ASP.NET MVC framework for developing HealthVault applications. The HealthVault .NET SDK is primarily geared towards ASP.NET Webforms.

In October I wrote about how one can deploy HealthVault applications on Windows Azure! This is has been a very popular article, check out some live samples running on Windows Azure here.

Flu Management
In April I post about Ushahidi’s Crisis management application for Swine Flu. In October I blogged in detailed about Microsoft’s Flu Management center and my little Flu widget.

HealthVault XML APIs
The HealthVault .NET SDK serves majority of HealthVault partners but last year we saw increase in adoption of our XML APIs consuming it through the Java SDK, Python SDK , Ruby Wrapper or the raw XML layers. The series on working with XML layer is a good starting point.

Connected Health Conference
For those of you who missed this conference in June, you can catch up here.

Programming Techniques & Data Analysis
Functional Programming, Memoization .. ring a bell? Well I plan on dwelling more on programming techniques and data analysis in 2010.

Feel free to let me know you top post for 2009, in comments.

• HealthCare needs to become more consumer: All innovation will be driven through this domain, PatientsLikeMe & CureTogether are prime examples.
• Keas launched as a platform for Care plans – I took it for a spin love the way you can create action items! Not as intuitive as Mint but not really a good analogy either.
• Health 2.0 Accelerator – A lot of media towards this effort of trying a create a platform (yet again) to add for value for the end consumer using the better together model. Here is a Demo Video.
• Public Health Media: Microsoft’s H1N1 Center, Google Flu Trends
• Mobile: WebMD iPhone App
• Physician’s Office: NPDigest.com – open source groupware for a clinic.

Please add your thought about the conference through the comments.

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