James is one of the Frictionless IoT devices that I built.
It’s the result of joining three main interests: Daily Journaling, Quantified Self and Frictionless Tangible interfaces.
It is unnecessary to describe the countless benefits of keeping a journal. At the end of the day we make a summary of the events that occurred, analyzing the consequences of our actions and meditating on what made us better as people that day.
At the same time, very few people have the time, energy and perseverance to write or have privacy issues in leaving their thoughts on paper. Even just stopping 5 minutes before going to bed, reflecting on the events experienced and evaluating the various aspects of one’s day has undoubted benefits both on the mind’s readiness to rest and on the motivation with which one starts a new morning.
If we also keep track of these assessments, we can look back and understand correlations between events, feelings, discomforts, motivations, etc.
I found out that several “me” coexist inside myself, These several sides of my personality, can even be identified as different people:
Physical me – defines how I feel at the physical level, my body’s energy to perform actions, my aches and pains, mobility and flexibility, quality of breathing, how my senses interact with the external world, etc.
Spiritual me – is the set of my moral and religious beliefs, and the related actions and events. It’s what identifies me as human and reflects my ideals of belonging to a society, humanity, clan, and faith.
Emotional me – defines how I feel emotionally and sentimentally, my happiness, motivation, hope, love, freedom, justice, gratitude, pride, safety, etc.
Rational me – is what I know, what I learn every day, and what I study or learn through experience. It’s the totality of knowledge, culture, education, and professional skills.
Every day we have to take action, nurture our beliefs and align with our principles, learn something to grow as people and as professionals, to care about our physical and mental well-being.
These four people coexist within ourselves and, interestingly, their evolution and well-being are often unrelated to one another. We can be physically sick but at the same time feel in peace with humanity and our ideals. Or we can be in perfect physical shape, satisfied and motivated but know that we have not followed an important moral principle and have done nothing to improve ourselves intellectually.
It is perfectly normal not to be constantly at the TOP of each four Personalities but, at the same time, if we can analyze and evaluate them we have a very powerful tool to improve ourselves and get motivation to change. Moreover, if such analysis is done with our family members, it becomes a formidable lever to discuss with our partner and our children.
Obviously, if we give an evaluation of our personalities, we create data; and data can be analyzed and used to improve. For this reason, I designed and created JAMES.
Using James is very simple; all I need to do is to reflect and analyze, for a few minutes, the events of the day, and how they have affected my personalities. Then I select the four knobs with a number from 1 to 100 that corresponds to the assessment I just made of each personality and press the button on top of the device.
The data are sent, via WiFi as a JSON structure, to a Firebase database that stores it.
From there I can, whenever I want, analyze the evolution of my personalities and evaluate how the evolution of one can affect the others.
In case James is used by several people (as I do in my family), each person has a small wooden avatar similar to a chess piece that places on top of the device before sending the data. That avatar contains a RFID TAG that is recognized by the device and the identity is saved within personal tables.
Here an example of the JSON record for each day:
“day”:{“data”:”20230322″, “who”:”Giovanni”, “physical”:70, “spiritual”:82, “emotional”:40 “rational”:86}
For now, I am still collecting the data and visualizing it on a dashboard on the web. Anyway, the most important part of the journey is these 10 minutes where, every night with my son, we exchange our little evolutions and share our experiences and daily learning.
