tracking the spine — first post

My friend Aaron Waychoff and I are starting a project to track the curvature in his spine. We are taking weekly pictures of him in front of a graph:

and using that — knowing the size of the squares (four inches on a side) to measure and track the curvature in his back. He’s going to work through Esther Gokhale’s 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, and we’ll see where it goes.

Using a data-driven investigation to perform experiments like this excites me a lot. There seems to be a bit of a culture for tracking one’s nutrition, exercise, sleep, or mood, but nothing I’ve found for tracking one’s musculoskeletal system (be that tracking pain or tracking posture.)

I’ve long felt there are a lot of tools out there for working with musculoskeletal problems … if one looks long and hard enough. At the same time, in Aaron’s case — when he’s had his hunchback since his teens, (he’s now in his early 30’s) — I also don’t know what is changable, and then on what time-scale those changes would happen. It’s much more comfortable to suggest Esther Gokhale’s work as an experiment along a path, rather than the path itself.

I’m also struck by how some things jump out in photos that are hard to see in day to day life: in the picture of Aaron, it is quite noticable that his hips are forward relative to his feet — creating an angle in his legs (his legs angle towards the front, rather than going straight up and down.) Something that isn’t at all apparent in person, but leaps out in a photo …