In response to a Tweet I recently posted about my #YellowJeepProject weight loss journey, Shannon O’Keefe suggested that I should take a look at the QNX Jeep Wrangler Reference vehicle. What a cool way to show off the “QNX CAR Platform for Infotainment“!

The QNX CAR Platform for Infotainment is a unique set of pre-integrated and optimized technologies from QNX Software Systems and dozens of ecosystem partners. Designed for flexibility, this unique platform provides development teams with a variety of options for building reliable world-class infotainment systems that keep pace with ongoing advancements in mobile device markets.

All of a sudden, I sensed a great convergence between my interest in the Internet of Things and my personal love for Jeeps.  What a great idea to have such leading edge, Internet-ready technology showcased in a vehicle that has become symbolic of freedom and adventure.  I’m sure those innovative folks who designed the first Jeep 72 years ago didn’t have a clue of what we are seeing now! It is stuff like this that moves us closer and closer to make connected cars a reality.

I enjoyed a subsequent exchange with Paul Leroux,  who authored the blog post about the Jeep reference vehicle.  I learned that both Shannon and Paul had offered their own garages to park the Jeep, so I knew better than to request that privilege.  I hope to see it sometime while it is on tour, or somehow wrangle (pun intended) a trip to its home base in Ottawa.

A short video about the making of the QNX reference vehicle is fun to watch.  Now, I could only convince the QNX folks to paint the Jeep yellow!

According to Wikipedia,

The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical). Such self-monitoring and self-sensing, which combines wearable sensors (EEG, ECG, video, etc.) and wearable computing, is also known as lifelogging. Other names for using self-tracking data to improve daily functioning are “self-tracking”, “auto-analytics”, “body hacking” and “self-quantifying”.

Without realizing I was becoming part of such a movement, I began using the Fitbit tracker device a while ago.  It is an integral part of tracking my daily activity for my Yellow Jeep weight loss project.

This week, I decided to replace the abysmal Fitbit calorie tracking capability with MyFitnessPal  which has a far more comprehensive database of food types.  It turns out that Fitbit works well as an a input to the MyFitnessPal site via a published API.  My basic setup is shown below.

I continue to carry my Fitbit device everywhere I go.  it syncs with the Fitbit iPhone app, which passes the information to the Fitbit website, which in turn passes the amount of calories measured by the Fitbit device to the MyFitnessPal app.  

I record my food and water intake in the MyFitnessPal iPhone app, which updates the MyFitnessPal database in the cloud.  The iPhone app also retrieves the calorie information that came from Fitbit and displays the calorie intake minus exercise output on my phone.

It is a fairly simple process, but seems to work well.  Stay tuned for some thoughts about addressing the larger Quantified Self puzzle.

Back on April 3rd, when I launched my personal Yellow Jeep weightloss project, I weighed in at a humongous 313 pounds.  Last week, before I headed to Idaho to visit my parents, I had dropped 24 pounds, down to 289.  This morning, after returning home to my trusty scales, my weight had dropped another two pounds to 287.  It is working!

The extra motivation I felt after publicly launching the Yellow Jeep Project  Facebook page last Saturday helped me weather some rough spots and kept my attention focused on the goal.

Thanks to everyone who has shared good wishes and words of encouragement.  As of this afternoon, 80 people had liked the Yellow Jeep Facebook page.  118 people had liked or mentioned posts related to the topic.  The response has been wonderful!

So now … onward and upward!  I am really going to do it this time!