Tuesday, June 1, 2010

adhd tracking

“It’s essentially a dull, boring task,” he said of the Quotient system, “so do you want to medicate your child to pay attention to dull, boring tasks?”

- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/health/01attention.html?pagewanted=2&hpw

Dr. Martin H. Teicher - a researcher in attention deficit - uses a system that tracks eye, head, and leg movements, in addition to posture and response time and accuracy while a participant is responding to a boring, meaningless, repetitive task for 20 minutes. The test aims to be a more objective assessment of ADD and ADHD, and returns a graph of one's state of engagement: "Green marks attentive, yellow is impulsive, red is distracted and blue is “disengaged.”"
Why not use a computer's built-in web-cam to produce an (admittedly imperfect) approximation? This could not just help people pre-diagnose themselves, but more importantly understand and control their own attention/focus. It will be interesting to see studies on whether and how an individual can affect their own level of attentiveness - my guess is that, for those who believe it can be done, they will learn to follow a practice much like a Zen monk who eventually learns to be entirely still and focused at all levels of consciousness (and even beyond?)
Linking this data to one's dietary intake would probably reveal a high correlation and significantly decrease the need for artificial stimulants.

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