Enabling Programmable Self with HealthVault

Organization of This Book

Although the chapters cover different topics, they have been arranged so that the concepts and techniques in earlier chapters form a foundation for the others.

Chapter 1, Getting Started with HealthVault

Health is critical to all of us. Health care and the infrastructure around it touch our lives and the lives of our loved ones. Many of us in pursuit of long-term health adopt goals ranging from controlling our weight to long-distance running. The health care industry is in an early stage of realizing the power of the digital world and the effectiveness of networks in helping drive change.

This chapter introduces HealthVault as a powerful tool for interacting with health data. It also provides a walkthrough of functionality available to the end user through HealthVault.

Chapter 2, Quantifying Yourself

Data is a powerful tool for changing behavior. The act of simply tracking something changes one’s perception of that activity. Summarizing the data over time provides a yardstick by which to measure, and the act of tracking activity over time uncovers patterns in behavior. The structured data in HealthVault provides such an opportunity. Moreover, the HealthVault ecosystem offers a variety of applications and devices to assist in this endeavor.

In this chapter we will explore how a consumer can use various devices to track critical health measures. We will also use common tools to explore the data stored by these devices into Microsoft HealthVault. We’ll capture and ...