Did you really throw away the software and not keep it in a VCS or on an extra storage device? I feel a sort of pain thinking about it—that if it really worked as well as described, it may not at all be easy to rebuild.
We kept the software. It’s somewhere on the cloud in a VCS. Not sure about the data. This was an embedded system. The hardest, most frustrating part to maintain was hardware integration. The prototype was a specific wearable device attached to a specific laptop. I erased that laptop and gave it away to a relative.
In a perfect world, I’d redo this project as a contractor for an established wearables company. I’d do the machine learning, they’d do the hardware and we’d outsource the data annotation to Mechanical Turk. (Data collection is easy. The data bottleneck is annotation.) But that takes industry connections I don’t have.
My other comment is that you probably didn’t succeed as well as you thought you did. I am taking your story at face value—that your model was spookily accurate, that it worked way better than you could reasonably expect, etc. But scale matters. Many tech prototypes work perfectly at small scales but would fail if you had built a few thousand or million hardware instances and tried them with the user wearing them across the full range of human activity and cultures.
But say you did, and your model that’s cheap enough to train on a laptop and run on an embedded CPU is perfectly accurate. How does this solve the actual problem? Obesity is caused by humans getting incredibly strong, insidious urges to eat (and maintain their weight once fat). The actual root cause is probably poisons in the food supply, explaining the delta between specific countries of genetically comparable people, but in any case, how does this gadget help?
In The Circle everyone wears cameras all the time and thus gets peer shamed into not eating, but this has issues other than the privacy ones, such as most people not being attractive enough/popular enough to have any peers to shame them.
I’ve on many occasions tried the myfitnesspal calorie counting. It does work but the longer you do it the stronger your urges to restore your missing mass. It’s like compressing a spring. Significant weight loss is very difficult. It’s not impossible, I’ve been −35 lbs for 4 years now, but I have not been able to get from being merely ‘overweight’ to ‘normal’ BMI.
Did you really throw away the software and not keep it in a VCS or on an extra storage device? I feel a sort of pain thinking about it—that if it really worked as well as described, it may not at all be easy to rebuild.
We kept the software. It’s somewhere on the cloud in a VCS. Not sure about the data. This was an embedded system. The hardest, most frustrating part to maintain was hardware integration. The prototype was a specific wearable device attached to a specific laptop. I erased that laptop and gave it away to a relative.
In a perfect world, I’d redo this project as a contractor for an established wearables company. I’d do the machine learning, they’d do the hardware and we’d outsource the data annotation to Mechanical Turk. (Data collection is easy. The data bottleneck is annotation.) But that takes industry connections I don’t have.
My other comment is that you probably didn’t succeed as well as you thought you did. I am taking your story at face value—that your model was spookily accurate, that it worked way better than you could reasonably expect, etc. But scale matters. Many tech prototypes work perfectly at small scales but would fail if you had built a few thousand or million hardware instances and tried them with the user wearing them across the full range of human activity and cultures.
But say you did, and your model that’s cheap enough to train on a laptop and run on an embedded CPU is perfectly accurate. How does this solve the actual problem? Obesity is caused by humans getting incredibly strong, insidious urges to eat (and maintain their weight once fat). The actual root cause is probably poisons in the food supply, explaining the delta between specific countries of genetically comparable people, but in any case, how does this gadget help?
In The Circle everyone wears cameras all the time and thus gets peer shamed into not eating, but this has issues other than the privacy ones, such as most people not being attractive enough/popular enough to have any peers to shame them.
I’ve on many occasions tried the myfitnesspal calorie counting. It does work but the longer you do it the stronger your urges to restore your missing mass. It’s like compressing a spring. Significant weight loss is very difficult. It’s not impossible, I’ve been −35 lbs for 4 years now, but I have not been able to get from being merely ‘overweight’ to ‘normal’ BMI.