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Hi, I'm Greg Schwartz. I've been wearing a BodyMedia armband, which tracks the number
of calories I burn each day, and I wore it to Burning Man to answer two questions:
how many more calories do I burn there, and when do I burn the most calories?
Burning Man, if you don't know, is a giant festival in the Nevada desert. In the daytime it's 90-100 degrees,
and at night it can get as low as 40 degrees. A huge temporary community is created, and
people bring art, perform, and socialize. People also bring "Art cars" of all shapes
and sizes; this is an old yacht named the Christy, mounted on a bus chassis.
And there are huge "sound camps" which are one of the ones I'm part of, called Opulent Temple, basically dance-clubs on the playa.
So, the sensor I wear is a BodyMedia armband,
with 4 sensors: galvanic skin response, skin temperature, heat
flux, which is how much heat is dissipating from your body, and a three axis accelerometer. So, how much you're moving.
So, on to the data I collected before Burning
Man, to serve as a baseline. Here's a quiet weekday, staying in rather than going out
after work. Overall, weekdays range from 3,000 to 4,000 calories, and average 3450.
Here's a particularly nice day on the weekend.
They average a few hundred calories more: 3787.
Get up, do some computer work, get a massage (with the sensor off, notice the flatline),
errands, and fire poi practice. Yup, I said fire practice :) I'm a fire
dancer, have been for about two years: I mostly spin poi, which are kevlar weights on a chain.
It's a lot of fun! But, the BodyMedia sensor isn't fire-safe, so I usually
don't wear it when I'm fire dancing. So anyway, here's my most intense day before
Burning Man. The bulk was from dancing the night before. Add on a poi performance (see
the flat line?) and walking around shopping for Burning Man gear. Total: 4300 calories.
So far, we've seen that weekends are more intense -- makes sense, weekdays are spent mostly at work.
Interestingly, the average weekday is about even with the least intense
weekend. My overall average is 3500 calories a day.
Now, on to Burning Man. Here's the quietest day I had there. I burned 4,433 calories.
That's 133 calories more than my MOST active day in the Default World!
Now, here's a normal day at Burning Man. "Normal".
I danced until almost sunrise, slept, worked at my camp, then went out to see some art
burn. 5063 calories, 630 more than my most active day here.
Now here's my most intense day. I danced until early morning (again),
slept, explored, then a huge party at my camp.
5,764 calories! That's 34% more than my default world max.
So, back to my questions. This graph shows how many calories I burned each day.
Right, so needless to say, I'm way below 4500 in the default world, and way above that at Burning Man.
I was very surprised by this.
Here's a summary view to explain it a little better. The diamonds indicate the averages.
Notice the range for Burning Man only barely overlaps the weekend!
Burning Man IS intense, but I think that's
actually because in the experiment I didn't do any day long bike rides or hikes.
Now for my second question, when do I burn the most? Much to my surprise, dancing here
and at Burning Man really aren't that different. They both peak around 10 calories a minute.
And they're both comparable to pre-Burn work that I did for my camp (electrical and fire effects).
Now, my next guess was setting up and tearing down camp -- this is really intense! But, well, they're not actually as intense
as dancing. Of course they were sustained efforts for hours, so I burned a ton
of calories. Tear Down was the second most intense day of my burn!
So, remember that I said I usually don't wear the BodyMedia sensor when I fire dance? Well,
I did one night, and check it out! The most intense moment of the week:
13 calories a minute! Which finally answers question number 2!
So the last thing I learned was an unexpected source of error. BodyMedia defines days as
midnight to midnight, so activity after midnight (like dancing) is counted for the next day, skewing
the total calories burned. Defining days as the time between sleeping would fix that.
So that's what I learned wearing my BodyMedia sensor at Burning Man. Thank you all for listening.
I hope the photos of Burning Man and fire dancing peaked your interest! You can follow
me on Twitter at UXGreg, and my email address is...
Also, I'm looking for an awesome company to join! I'm a User Experience Designer.