Andrew and Jay’s PHP Findings

Posted on February 19, 2016

PHP 1st Blog Post

To begin the PHP, Jay and I conducted extensive interviews with one another in an effort to gain a better understanding of each other’s health goals. This interview allowed each of us to really understand each other’s progression over time and how each of us arrived at the goal that we currently wanted to achieve.

Andrew’s Findings

Immediately, Jay made it clear to me that his main goal was sleeping, and I wanted to find a way to track quantifiable data to help Jay get a longer and more restful night of sleep each night. To me, it seemed as if the amount of quantifiable data that I could track for this was limited, so from the start I had him record time asleep, time awake, and total hours per night while also keeping track of caffeine, stress, physical activity, and alcohol intake. Jay has done pretty well with meeting his goals as he continues to meet the nightly sleep minimum and was only a few minutes shorts of his weekly average goal.
For myself, I noticed that just having some structure in my day led me to want to carry out the tasks I was supposed to because I had a set time in which to do them. Knowing that I needed to do pushups and planks every night before I fell asleep has really put me into a habit that I am now routinely following.
Looking forward, I am interested in exploring other factors that may affect Jay’s sleeping habits. For instance, further exploration could be done on the quality of his sleep and how he spends the first 30 minutes of every day to see how that affects his day. Furthermore, Jay is also interested in getting into a more structured workout schedule throughout the week. Once we are able to track both exercise and sleep, we will hopefully be able to draw correlations between the two to gain a better understanding of how the two relate.

Jay’s Findings

Discipline is a habit in and of itself. Like all habits, they are difficult to start and even harder to continue. Andrew’s health goal was neither immediately time consuming nor exhausting, but building up the kind of strength he wanted had to be of his own desire. Luckily, our data demonstrates that Andrew has/had the discipline to carry out and continue his goal to this day. He has already increased the number of push ups he can do by 15 in the past 2 weeks. I would like to see if he can use this discipline for his cardio PHP for the next couple of weeks, especially when the running route we planned for him is 3.1 miles.
As for myself, the PHP hit me right when my sleep schedule was starting to go off kilter due to NROTC responsibilities (and punishments) on top of a normalized workload. However, this project did encourage me to go to bed before 1am to maintain that minimum hour sleep schedule. One of the things I would like to see is if we can quantify my stressful days and see what my definition of stressful is; maybe that can apply to Andrew’s PHP as well.
On a bigger scope, this makes me wonder, as a biomedical or rehabilitation engineer, how to instill that same kind of discipline across multiple patients, ranging from an 8 y/o boy with ADHD to a 48 y/o woman who works 2 jobs to support herself and her family. They will have the desire, no doubt, but whether or not they will participate in the long run is questionable and one of the most difficult challenges for us as engineers.