This feels very fast. A year ago there were a small number of Quantified Self devices, and a sense of high geekery. I walked into the Apple Store in Santa Monica last Wednesday and this is what I saw. There isn’t much that’s more mainstream than Apple retail at the moment, and I counted twenty-two Quantified Self trackers for sale. (Two were baby trackers and one dog tracker, borderline cases, but our curiosity extends to these.)
A question for readers: What kinds of self-tracking tools aren’t here now that will be here when I take this photo next year?
Here is a key to the photo:
- Pocketfinder personal GPS locator
- Tagg GPS dog tracker
- Fitbit One and Zip physical activity sensors
- iPING personal putting coach and app
- Wahoo Fitness bluetooth heart rate strap
- Scosche Rhythm heart rate monitor armband
- Jawbone Up physical activity and sleep sensor
- Pear Training heart rate monitor and training app
- Adidas MiCoach bluetooth heart rate monitor
- Adidas MiCoach Speed Cell activity sensor
- Nike+ sports sensor
- Nike+ Fuelband physical activity sensor
- Withings baby monitor
- Philips in.Sight wireless baby monitor
- IZON Wireless Camera -
- Philips in.Sight wireless camera
- Lark sleep sensor wristband
- Lark Life physical activity and sleep sensor
- iBGStar blood glucose sensor
- iHealth wireless blood pressure wrist monitor
- Withings blood pressure monitor
- Withings wireless scale
I was thinking that having a coach compile your top five goals and then compile the data from other tracking systems for you. The coach would call once per day and tabulate your data and encourage you. Then, you would have a home page to track progress over time for running, books read, words written, evernote notes, or what have you. The goal is a single umbrella of aggregation of all quantified personal data.
This is a crosspost from Kevin Kelly’s facebook post…I think the big missing link here in the brain hacking space is a true portable EEG that can track my brain patterns throughout the day so I can compare brain states, performance, etc. Years ago I was talking with Luciana Haill who’s been selling and experimenting with the IBVA unit (http://www.ibva.co.uk/) which is compatible with Mac software. She’s definitely been someone at the frontier of this and the unit has held it’s own for years now.
The issue is though for daily use, I don’t want to have to wear a headband all day or at the very least it needs to be more discreet and sexy. I don’t think we’re that far away from having a simple interface that allows us to truly peak inside ourselves and bring some perspective to the blindspot between our ears.
Paul, see http://www.interaxon.ca/
I want a calorie tracker where you don’t have to input any information. There MUST be a way. LOL. I don’t actually need to know what the calories are, I just need to know if I’m eating more than I’m burning on any given day. Must be a way, right? It’s a gazbillion dollar item if someone figures it out.
The problem with tracking calories is that you can’t account for them simply without using packaged food. Packaged food is what is killing you.
Agreed Chris, I’d like an platform that aggregates all the data streams from my self tracking apparatuses and shows the interrelationship of those data points.
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One thing that may look different next year – what if most of these devices are gone? Apple, by selling them in their stores is getting good retail data about what people want and care about it. The iPhone already has a bunch of sensors on it. I’ll be curious to see if they continue to treat QS affordances as add ons or absorb them into their realm. If the latter happens, it will probably be in the known areas of this year’s QS stuff, leaving things like EEG , EMG, non-invasive blood monitors, and emotion tracking as interesting areas for newcomers.
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