Recently I’ve gone a bit of a data mining splurge. I’ve started calculating the distance I move each day, created a huge spreadsheet of ALL my spending and, the most common area that people data mine about themselves, working out how many calories I eat. I’ve started to look a bit more in to how I could possibly drill down in to these categories.

The obvious answer for drilling into the amount of exercise I get each day is to get something like a fit bit and a GPS tracker.

The fit bit is pretty much a fancy pedometer that tries to work out what your doing based on its 3d accelerometer. Now you could marry the information from the fit bit with a tracking program on your phone that uses the GPS and this would give you an actual distance travelled, what speed you did it at and how you did it, I assume here the fit bit is actually a little intelligent and can tell the difference between lets say walking and cycling. So that would be exercise taken care of.

The next two are a little more problematic to automatically data mine, I spend most of my hard earned cash in one of 2 places. The canteen at work and the local supermarket, at both of these locations I use a semi smart card. At work my campus card also doubles up as the payment card at the canteen, coffee stand and in the ‘corner shop’. The annoying bit about about this ‘smart’ card is that even though the data pertains to me I can’t get any of the data stored and I’m sure that they keep at a minimum how much I spend and when. With that information I’d be able to see the pattern of my eating everyday at work, time stamps and prices would give a good indication of what I’m eating and when I’m eating it as well as helping drill down into my finances.

The other ‘smart’ card I use on a regular basis is one of the big supermarkets loyalty cards. It a minimum they must keep a track of my spending to be able to dole out my loyalty points and I’d dare wager that they keep a damned sight more information than than. What I’d really love to get from them is a fully itemised list of what I buy, again this would help track my current total spend there (and on what).

Then with both lists I could essentially totally workout my entire diet, week by week and give a rough total calorie count of the food that I’ve bought. And thats just the start of my data mining ideas…