Archive for the ‘Fitness and health’ Category

Silence is Golden, the Game

by Bruce Kasanoff

Two armed men approached the ten-year-old boy. One had a gun. The other a machete.

Timmy just stood there, silently.

The larger guy, sweating profusely and wiping blood off his forehead, looked the boy in the eye and warned, “I am going to mess you up.”

Timmy allowed himself the tiniest of smiles, and focused on taking deep, steady breaths as slowly as possible.

The giant fainted. His partner wasn’t happy. He slammed the hilt of his blade into a car window, smashing it. “You did that, punk. It ain’t going to work on me.”

With a barely perceptible glance, Timmy looked over the mercenary’s shoulder at the indicators monitoring Timmy’s vitals. His pulse was 20% under his normal resting rate. He’d set a new record for standing motionless, both in terms of lack of motion and duration. His focus scores were through the roof – best ever.

He slowed things down ever more. The thug started whimpering like a scared puppy, then he, too, fainted.

Down the block, a new group of criminals materialized. Timmy could sense shadows growing from vantage points on top of buildings. There would be new weapons to contend with, new surprises designed to startle him out of his calm and focused state.

No worries.

This was ten times better than sitting in a room with a stupid psychologist babbling on and on about how ADD was just a different way of a brain responding. It wasn’t lame, either, like exercises out of the three dozen books his Mom bought about kids with differences.

This game was smart. It watched his body, inside and out. The better he controlled his breath, movements, and focus, the more power he gained. The calmer he got, the more things he controlled. The more he controlled, the higher his score.

Funny thing, too. The slower he became, the easier the game seemed. He was better able to figure out what the game was going to throw at him next, to spot the mistakes his attackers made… or were about to make.

There, it happened. A force field formed around the approaching gang; now all he had to do was tighten the field until they couldn’t move. Timmy took his slowest, deepest breath ever.

Written by Bruce Kasanoff of Now Possible, where science fiction meets business.

PreMergency EMS

by Bruce Kasanoff

Two miles into her hike, Jessica could finally see the ridge line up ahead. From there, she would have an amazing view of the valley below.

She heard her two dogs barking. A few strides later, she had her first glimpse of the clearing at the top of the ridge, and was surprised to see the dogs surrounding a man who was sitting cross-legged on a big boulder. Their tails were wagging enthusiastically, so she decided to trust their instincts.

“Hey,” the man said with a big grin, “You found my secret hiding place.”

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” Jessica responded.

“No worries, I just finished meditating. I’m Jake.”

“Jessica,” she said, shaking his hand.

She looked out over the vista, which stretched for dozens of miles. Nothing but wilderness and blue skies. Heaven.

“It’s great that you meditate. I’ve tried it off and on.”

“It’s part of my job, literally. We’re required to meditate and exercise consistently.”

Jessica looked back at Jake. He was about 30, lean and strong, with close-cropped hair. She couldn’t figure out what his line of work was, so she asked, “What sort of job requires meditation?”

“PreMergency crews.”

“Pre Mergency? Like before an emergency?”

Jake smiled. He liked explaining his job, especially since less than 100 people in the world had so far been trained to do it.

“I’m part of a test program in Minneapolis where we respond to potential medical emergencies before they happen. The meditation and exercise requirement is because we’re constantly showing up on people’s doorsteps and telling them they are just minutes away from a heart attack or other life-threatening problem. We need to project calm assertive energy, or otherwise the person might freak and die.”

Jessica narrowed her eyes. She was trying to decide if he was being sincere, or putting her on. But he really did project calm and assertive energy, so she decided to believe him.

“How do you know someone is about to face an emergency?”

“Lots of ways. We have almost two dozen wireless biosensors that monitor heart rate, pulse, and other vital signs. With elderly patients, we monitor movement – movement is good, by the way. We use different sensors for different patients. Over 35,000 patients are enrolled in the program, ranging from the very sick to some who are in better shape than you or me.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. All the signals go into an automated center, and when anything varies from normal, someone like me goes out to check. I’m somewhere between an emergency medic and God.”

Jessica took a moment to digest this. She imagined a middle-aged man sitting in a big easy chair, rubbing his chest to wish away indigestion, when the doorbell rings. Jake is at the door and says something like: you’re not going to rub away that pain; let’s get you to the hospital and stop that heart attack before it happens.

“Why do you say God?” she asked.

“In the past three months, I’ve saved twelve people who most likely would have died if I hadn’t rang their bell. One was a mother who gave birth three weeks later; she was going to name her child after me, but it turned out to be a girl. In most of the cases, the person didn’t even know anything was wrong. It sure feels like divine intervention.”

Jessica looked out over the valley. She couldn’t help wondering if she had what it takes to play God, too.

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Written by Bruce Kasanoff of Now Possible, where science fiction meets business. Echo Valley Ranch inspired this story.

ALS Entrepreneur

by Bruce Kasanoff

“I will never leave a fallen comrade.”

They tell me that’s the most important line in the soldier’s creed. I live by it.

I am one of the lucky ones. I have ALS, and have been “locked-in” for three years. For nine months, I had no way to communicate with the world. Couldn’t talk. Or write.

My mind is sharp as ever. Spirit strong. I had fallen. My wife left; it was hell.

My brother, Jim, stuck by my side. He got me a BCI, or brain-computer interface. I type by looking at a screen. Letters flash in a repeating pattern. When I see the right one, my brain goes “aha!” and the letter gets added to whatever I’m writing.

One year in, I was emailing, slowly. Each paragraph took about 15 minutes. It was a miracle.

Emailed my accountant and some friends. Tested my ideas, and checked my bank balance; I’ve been lucky, it was better than expected. Hired an assistant, then a programmer, Ted. Decided to start a firm. Guess what we make?

BCIs.

First task was to give me more lifelines. Ted built a navigation interface for me, so I could open files and surf the web using the same sort of “aha!” brain signal. It also lets me play songs, control the lights, call my assistant…

Ted even built me an avatar. Using hot buttons, I can make it smile, cheer, grimace, clap, jump or 97 other actions. It makes in-person interactions a lot more natural. (When someone’s in the room with me, I keep the avatar on one screen and my flashing letters on the other. With people I know well, I can react almost in real time (or, when I get excited, ahead of real time!)

OK. I was back in business. Wrote a mission statement: free everyone else like me.

Gave it to a grant writer, Lisa, and hired a biz dev guy, Mark. Lisa brought in $457,000 the first 12 months. Mark reached out to leading BCI labs around the world, found the smartest technology firms in this area, and – our big break – discovered a billionaire-who-wishes-to-be-anonymous whose sister is locked in.

Mr. B. put $5 million into my firm. That let us take Ted’s programs and make them ready for prime time (add help screens, get rid of the bugs, design pretty interfaces…)

The grants let us start training BCI assistants. Remember, our clients can’t do anything for themselves, at least until we get involved. The money also helped us start finding the people we are trying to free. One of the problems serving our client base is that they don’t (can’t) call their friends and recommend our services. Even when we restore their ability to communicate, their locked-in friends don’t have a means to receive such messages.

So we started building a database of ALS patients worldwide. It seems to be the first. I realized the more names we found, the better we could validate the market size and demonstrate our growth potential. So now five interns work on the project, with one FT manager.

Applied for more grants. Learned how to help get funds for our clients to pay for our services. I will never abandon someone with ALS. Somehow, we find a way to pay the expenses.

(BTW, sorry if my sentences are too clipped; it saves me time.)

Two years in, we had 15 employees. One, a talented kid named Clara, was joking with me, “When do I get to use some of these toys?”

Eureka.

The bigger the market, the more investors pay attention, and the greater the economies of scale. Stuff gets cheaper. Thanks to Clara, I realized we should be selling BCIs to healthy people. After all, the vast majority of people don’t have ALS; they aren’t locked in. If I could convince healthy people to use BCIs, I could drive the cost of our headsets down from thousands of dollars to less than a hundred.

But why would a healthy person use a BCI? They are slow beyond belief. Much faster to type than to watch flashing letters one at a time, etc.

Gathered the team, and we brainstormed.

There are numerous situations in which your brain generates a recognizable change in activity. To name a few, when you:

- realize you have made a mistake
- recognize a face or object
- are fascinated
- grow weary
- become bored

For example, when you realize you just hit the wrong letter on a keyboard, your brain sort of goes “oops.” Your brain waves change. If your typing program knows exactly when you thought “oops,” it can highlight the letter you typed just before your brain went “oops.” Then, it can show you some likely replacements. When you see the right letter, your brain sort of goes “aha!” The program could automatically fix your error.

Congratulations. You just corrected a typo with your thoughts.

A BCI could help you teach Microsoft Word new words. Imagine you type an acronym the program has never seen before. The program highlights the “error,” but then does not detect any indication that you made a mistake. In other words, it “senses” that you are confident this word is correct. So the program eliminates the error message, saving you the time of manually adding the word to your dictionary.

A BCI is the only device we can think of that offers complete and total privacy to its user.

You could sit across from a person at a table, give instructions to your BCI, and the other person would have no idea. You could remain motionless and silent, but your instructions could put actions in motion far outside the room in which you are sitting.

Since BCIs are so crude today – they cannot read your thoughts, not by a long shot – this idea requires a very, VERY, simple interface. Think: two or three signals, tops. Such as “yes” or “no.” Fortunately, yes and no can take you a long way.

We came up with the idea of combining a BCI with a wireless phone. The phone has no controls whatsoever; is looks like a Bluetooth earpiece and is only designed for incoming calls. It is designed for executives to use with their assistants. We call it: EitherOr. Basically, someone calling you on this device can give you the choice of either one option or another, and your brain will think “aha!” when you hear the right choice. The BCI recognizes this response.

On a regular basis, your assistant checks in with you by calling your earpiece. You hear her, but what she hears in return is an automated voice that says either “yes” or “no,” or “the first choice” or “the second,” based on which response your brain triggers. On each call, she follows a similar pattern, asking:

“Do you need my help?” (If “no,” she hangs up.)
“Would you like me to pull you out of the meeting?” (If “yes,” she comes and gets you.)
“Do you need access to important facts, or would you like a colleague to join you? (You answer “first.”)
“Do you need budget estimates or opinions from outside experts?” (You answer “first.”)
“Do you want sales for this quarter or next quarter?” (You answer “first.”)

“Sales for this quarter are projected to be $3.4 million, breaking down as follows. The Northeast will generate $750,000, which is a rise of 7%…”

Someone sitting across the table from you will have no idea what is happening. You are perfectly silent, and moving normally. EitherOr is a secret weapon, or a discrete tool, depending on whether you like wartime analogies or not. I do, given my obsession with never leaving a fallen comrade behind.

Over the past four months, we sold 250,000 units. This Christmas, we are coming out with a toy version that kids can use, and preorders just topped 3.7 million units. We make $20 each, which totals to $74 million in sales.

Tomorrow, my dream will start coming true. We are going to announce that our BCI systems for ALS individuals will now be free. Yes, free. Sales to business executives and kids will completely cover the cost of these higher end units. There’s still much work to do finding locked-in individuals and training the assistants each one needs, but that’s all doable.

The tough part was figuring out what a healthy person could do with a BCI. Doing so set all my comrades free.

Written by Bruce Kasanoff of Now Possible, where science fiction meets business.

(Note: Brendan Allison helped inspired and inform this story, but bears no responsibility for its flaws.)

Yoga center learns from Starbucks, takes it up a notch

by Bruce Kasanoff

Last night, Max Strom taught me how to breathe. In retrospect, it seems surprising that across 20 years of school and a few decades of life, no one shared this lesson before.

I met Max courtesy of Kaia Yoga, a Westport, CT gem that defies easy categorization. His two-hour Learn to Breathe workshop is one of many special events they host that feature world-class experts.

Kaia straddles the borders between New Age and Information Age, between suburban life and physical renewal, and between peaceful and invigorating. This is no smelly gym or overcrowded yoga joint. It’s more like a giant but cozy Starbucks, minus the coffee and plus huge doses of stretching.

Apathetic towards yoga until Kaia arrived in town, I was attracted last year by the physical space and a nearly free trial offer. The center has light pouring in from oversized windows, high ceilings and gleaming white walls, all balanced by enough cushions (okay, “bolsters”), artwork and smiles to make even a novice feel welcome.

Rock climbing or yoga? You decide.

Kaia has learned much from Starbucks. The central area includes a waterfall, sofa and lots of huge cushions you can toss on the floor and sit on. There’s a cafe in the back, with food so healthy you lose weight just by walking nearby. Best of all, no one brings a laptop and they just banned cell phones (I leave mine in the car, anyway.)

Americans need gathering spots in which we feel connected. I say “Americans” because much of the rest of the world figured this out many years ago, while we were building sprawling suburbs and walling ourselves inside larger and larger homes.

Still, it took me a year to stretch beyond my weekly classes and attend one of Kaia’s special events. I went because my trusted and very down-to-earth instructor, Megan Moss Freeman, said Max was one of her absolute favorites. That was too strong an endorsement to pass up.

As for Max, he is the author of a Life Worth Breathing. Max is a large guy with a gentle but self-assured manner, and last night he literally taught us how to breathe fully and deeply, while explaining the benefits of doing so.

Early on, he asked why it is that the healthcare industry encourages pregnant women to take Lamaze – which is basically a breathing class – but they don’t teach breathing to other patients who experience intense pain or anxiety? Hmm. Three times, I helped my wife breathe her way through childbirth, and it seemed to help a great deal.

Although Max took pains to avoid New Age dogma or anything that might be construed as religious or spiritual, what I liked best was the very end of the evening when we were resting on our backs in the darkened room.

For a few minutes, I didn’t feel like a father, husband, or business strategist. I felt like everyone in the room was connected. Much as I like Starbucks, I’ve never experienced that feeling while drinking coffee.

PreMergency (a “Coming Soon” story)

by Bruce Kasanoff 8 Comments

(Here’s another fictionalized story I wrote partly for fun, and partly to illustrate the ways I hope my 1toEverything chart gets your imagination going. By the way, the lodge and the dogs really exist.)

Two miles into her hike, Sara could finally see the ridgeline up ahead. From there, she would have an amazing view of Echo Valley.

Following instructions from Nan, owner of the guest ranch, she began her hike by calling out, “Who wants to go for a walk?” to the nine Australian Shepherds who lived on the ranch. Four joined her. The dogs would give plenty of notice to the bears and other wildlife that lived in the woods of British Columbia, preventing any nerve-wracking meetings.

Sara hiked past the pasture that was home to about 40 horses, and followed the twisting path through the woods. It was a gorgeous early morning, and the cool temperatures kept her comfortable and energized.

Up ahead, Sara heard the dogs barking. A few strides later, she had her first glimpse of the clearing at the top of the ridge, and was surprised to see the dogs surrounding a man who was sitting cross-legged on a big boulder. Their tails were wagging enthusiastically, so she decided to trust their instincts.

“Hey,” the man said with a big grin, “You found my secret hiding place.”

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” Sara responded.

“No worries. Besides, you brought some of my friends with you.” He held out his hand. “I’m Jake, staying at Echo Valley just like you.”

“Sara,” she said, shaking his hand.

“A pleasure. Did you come in last night? I don’t remember you from dinner.”

“Yep. We didn’t get here until after 10. I didn’t realize it would take six hours to get here from Vancouver.”

“It does, unless you have Norm fly you in.” Norm was the other owner, a passionate pilot who built his own airstrip on the ranch’s property and gladly flew in any guest who didn’t want to endure the lengthy drive over not very good roads. “I’ve been here four days, and every morning I come out here to meditate. This spot is one of the main reasons I’ve been coming to the ranch for four years.”

Sara sat down on a rock opposite Jake. She looked out over the vista, which stretched for dozens of miles. Nothing but wilderness and blue skies. Heaven.

“It’s great that you meditate. I’ve tried it off and on.”

“It’s part of my job, literally. We’re required to meditate and exercise consistently.”

Sara looked back at Jake. He was about 30, lean and strong, with close-cropped hair. She couldn’t figure out what his line of work was, so she asked, “What sort of job requires meditation?”

“PreMergency crews.”

“Pre Mergency? As in before an emergency?”

Jake smiled. He liked explaining his job, especially since less than 100 people in the world had so far been trained to do it.

“I’m part of a test program in Minneapolis in which we respond to potential medical emergencies before they happen. The meditation and exercise requirement is because we’re constantly showing up on people’s doorsteps and telling them they are just minutes away from a heart attack or other life-threatening problem. We need to project calm, assertive energy, or otherwise the person might freak and die.”

Sara narrowed her eyes. She was trying to decide if he was being sincere, or putting her on. But he really did project calm and assertive energy, so she decided to believe him.

“How do you know someone is about to face an emergency?”

“Lots of ways. We have almost two dozen wireless biosensors that monitor heart rate, pulse, and other vital signs. With elderly patients, we monitor movements like stride length and cadence. We use different sensors for different patients. Over 35,000 patients are enrolled in the program, ranging from the very sick to some who are in better shape than you or me.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. All the signals go into an automated center, and when anything varies from normal, someone like me goes out to check. I’m somewhere between an emergency medic and God.”

Sara took a moment to digest this. It was a lot to absorb at 7 a.m. She imagined a middle-aged man sitting in a big easy chair, rubbing his chest to wish away indigestion, when the doorbell rings. Jake is at the door and says something like: you’re not going to rub away that pain; let’s get you to the hospital and stop that heart attack before it happens.

“Why do you say God?” she asked.

“In the past three months, I’ve saved twelve people who most likely would have died if I hadn’t rang their bell. One was a mother who gave birth three weeks later; she was going to name her child after me, but it turned out to be a girl. In most of the cases, the person didn’t even know anything was wrong. It sure feels like divine intervention.”

A dog came over and pushed Jake’s leg with his snout. “Sorry, Wally, are we ignoring you?”

Jake put his hand up, and the dog went up on his hind legs and hit Jake’s hand with a paw. “He likes to slap five,” said Jake, with pleasure.

Sara had a thought. “You’re sort of like Wally and his friends. You sniff out trouble before it happens, and you keep the bears and humans separate. Only instead of bears, you chase away all sorts of grizzly medical problems.”

“Ouch,” replied Jake, grimacing in good nature at the weak pun even as he warmed up to Sara.

“Playing dog, or playing God. Might be the same thing, except for the order of the letters. Either way, I love my job.”

Personalized physical ed class

by Bruce Kasanoff 1 Comment

by Fred Strong, Dean of Faculty, Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences

High school PE class. Maybe you liked it, maybe you dreaded it. Did you have “lines” and “squads”?

Even if the teaching methods in your class were more enlightened than back in my day, the drills and games probably showed who could or couldn’t do what, day after day.

And when the course was over, were you better “physically educated?” Were you better prepared to live a healthy life? Maybe, maybe not.

Now add heart rate monitors, smart phones and websites, class database software, and a creative teacher at Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences. Individualized fitness routines suddenly become the heart of the curriculum. Instruction is truly diversified for each individual, and the occasional class game is a fun, social diversion. Most of all, students learn what it means to create independent workouts for themselves. They set a trajectory for their own lifelong fitness.

A 9th grade girl says that in the past, PE was always about Presidential Fitness goals and team-building skills. “You might be good at one thing and not good at something else. I was always comparing myself to everybody else, but there was no real way in the class to get better at things I wasn’t good at.”

Now everything is personalized for her. Mike Bernier, her teacher, bought a set of heart-rate monitors for his high school PE fitness curriculum in 2009. At the start of the year, he taught his students to use them, and that immediately set the mold for very dynamic and individualized instruction.

Students work out on weight-room and aerobic equipment and keep track of their heart rate. But it’s much more than just watching a number on a monitor. A 9th grade boy in the class says, “A single number isn’t that important. I look at the data of my workouts over time, look at graphs of that data, and set goals for myself.”

I asked him how he sets goals for himself, and he quickly started talking about researching different muscle groups, learning about fitness routines that supported different sports seasons, and then tracking his growth over time.

I asked him if he had always enjoyed PE classes in the past. “Yes,” he said, “but this class is different. Now we have the space to make our own goals. That’s really fun.” The investment and ownership he was expressing came through loud and clear.

Mike Bernier, the teacher and department head, describes how the pieces fit together. Students exercise with the heart-rate monitors. At the end of class, they wirelessly synch the data from their monitors to Mike’s pocket PC, and then later in the day, he downloads the data to a web-based class database (in our case, Moodle). All students in the school have accounts on Moodle, and they can access their data, work with charts and graphs, and communicate with the teacher (and each other).

Mike gives each student the option of either bringing in a workout they already have or working with him to research and design a workout. He directs them to certain websites as resources (all this information is on his course website), and he also encourages students to explore various workout apps on smartphones (if they have them). He helps them screen the apps to make sure they’re legitimate and tailored to the student’s needs.

As Mike says, “High school students are more into this than anything I’ve ever seen before. They learn about their physiology, they set target zones that are specific to them, and they set goals for themselves each day based on their circumstances.” In fact, when I observed a class recently, Mike was talking to a boy who wasn’t feeling well, so Mike was asking him how he would adjust his goals for that day. And the rest of the class wasn’t standing around waiting; they all had their workouts that they were starting in on.

I asked the girl why the Presidential Fitness program hadn’t worked for her in the way this did. “That program measured where I was, but it didn’t teach me how to improve.” I asked her how this program taught her to improve. “I used to reach my target heart-rate on the exercise bike, but now I’m at a fitness level that biking doesn’t get me there. So I switched to running, to develop other muscles and to create the workout that would get my heart rate where it needs to be. I used to be a terrible runner,” she concluded. “Now I run every day after school.”

And the 9th grade boy took his data with him to math class. He had an assignment to identify something important in his life, hypothesize about a correlation that helped to make it happen, and then collect data and graph it. He took his heart rate data and graphed it for math class. And got a good grade in both math and PE!

Mike Bernier’s class website and course syllabus can be found here. Please logon as a guest, then select “Course Categories” then “Upper School Classes” then “PE” and then “Upper School Fitness.”

Keap your brain sharp (I mean keep)

by Bruce Kasanoff

“The baby boom, ” says Derrick Chasan of CogniFit, “Is the first generation that both has access to cognitive fitness programs and is aware of the fact that exercising your cognitive abilities helps you keep them sharp.” In other words, use it or lose it.

The problem is that you get very good at what you do, and thus your brain doesn’t have to work very hard to go through your daily routine. (If you still can), think about what you do each day. Most of us have a great deal of routine in our lives. Even on tough days, we seldom challenge our brains to learn new tasks. You may be a knee surgeon, but after performing the same operation 5,214 times, you are not challenging your brain.

What’s a new task? Try learning the cello at age 52, or learning Japanese at 61. Either will keep your brain sharp, but since few of us take on such challenges, Chasen says there’s a need for online cognitive fitness programs like CogniFit.

This slick product – I mean that in a good way – performs an initial assessment of your cognitive abilities and then creates a customized set of training exercises designed to turn your weaknesses into strengths. It requires a fairly significant investment of time, but Chasen says their approach is the most scientifically rigorous of the many brain training offerings out there. Although the site just launched a little less than two months ago, a predecessor CD-based product has been around for ten years and this version is based on training results of over 112,000 users.

Even if you don’t immediately decide to start working with their Personal Coach training program, it’s worth a visit to their site to learn about what aging does your yur brain.