This September, our Quantified Self community is coming together for a new experiment. Working together, we are going to create a world-wide, week long, open festival devoted to “self knowledge through numbers.” If you use or make self-tracking tools, or have knowledge or inspiration to share with a wider audience than you might find at a normal QS Show&Tell,  I hope you will continue reading to learn how you can participate.

For the last six months, Alex, Ernesto, and I have been hard at work trying to understand how to stage this festival this in the most simple, inclusive, and meaningful way. We are already quietly on track to put on dozens of separate events in the Bay Area and around the world during the days of the festival. (We will have a public announcement of the program when it is more complete.) QS Week is going to include: Demos of new self-tracking tools. Keynote talks and debates. Workshops on how to do meaningful tracking for health, sports & fitness, cognition, emotion, productivity, and play. Collaborative experiments. Self-tracking art and design.

Let us know if you have a demo or a workshop to give, and/or a venue to offer. Our goal is to have an open, diverse program. If you have a tool to demo or a workshop you want to lead, fill out the short form below or at bit.ly/qsweek. We will follow up to discuss.

Much of the program will be “hand-crafted” by Alex, Ernesto, and me, in our normal style. However, since this event will be far bigger than anything we’ve ever tried, we have an open attitude about offers to participate. As always, our emphasis will be on the personal meaning of personal data – not on academic, managerial, or commercial data concerns. Our goal is to help people by creating a good context for collaborative discovery, guided by our three Prime Questions: What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn?

Is there a deadline to propose something?

Please let us know as soon as you can. The earlier you propose, the easier it is for us to help you find your audience. The form is below.

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We don’t need to rehash the idea that we are also in the midst of an explosion of tools and services that support the gathering of health-related data. If you’re reading this, you know that the Quantified Self movement is gaining traction and new devices and applications are being introduced at a rapid rate. Naturally, these tools are heard towards helping an individual lead a healthier life. This inherently creates a future-focus environment in which the user is presented data, analytics and recommendations for positive health behavior change in the future. This is typically accomplished through two methods, information on current behavior and goal progress information. We argue that many of these tools and services are not taking full advantage of the vast amount of information that is available to them.

The wide-spread proliferation of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow developers and users to access large amount of data opens up numerous possibilities for possibly improving the health and behavior conversation between a user and his or her tools/system of choice. We foresee unique opportunities to use historical behavioral data, contextual information (e.g. location, social interactions), and health actions to highlight patterns and provide feedback through three mechanisms: 1) reminders of success, 2) behavioral prompting, and 3) contextual reminders.

The road to good health is not an easy one and there are numerous examples of individuals who unfortunately lapse into negative or poor behavior patterns. We are proposing that when “failure” points are identified there is an fantastic opportunity to remind the user of previous success. Reminding a user that they have had success in the past may help to limit self-doubt and reductions of self-efficacy. The psychological burden associated with failing to meet goals could be quickly replaced with a positive a reminder of the user’s mental and physical capability that is based on objective historical information. Instead of just having an empty “You can do it!” we envision future services that say, “We believe you can do it because, look, you’ve done it before!”

We also see the potential for building upon the concept of modeling illustrated in social learning theory and social cognitive theory. While modeling is typically thought of in the social sense, we propose that services can use historical data and contextual information to create powerful and meaningful representations of a user (maybe as a digital avatar). By presenting a user with their past self they can use it as a tool for comparison (“What am I typically like?”) or competition (“How can I be better than my previous self”). Imagine, for example, waking up in the morning and seeing your past self and associated behavioral data in your bathroom mirror or on a display on your refrigerator. We believe that this past self could act a positive guide to help you lead a healthier life.

Lastly, the large amount of information stored in your behavioral databases has an inherent ability to converge and provide information about contextual factors associated with behavior. For example, we can easily find out if you get more or less steps on days it is raining or if you tend to eat worse when you check in to airports around dinner time. Using simple data mining and contextual linking it is possible to identify positive behaviors patterns and bring them to light. By tapping into the rich digital histories being captured and stored across many services we may not only help a user remember, but also enhance their ability to celebrate and re-enjoy healthy behaviors.

Too often, we encounter warnings of services tracking out behavior and using if for their own personal gain. It is time that we ask the tools and applications we use to help us lead healthier lives by taking full advantage of the vast amount of historical information we are collecting. The Spanish philosopher, George Santayana told us, “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Our increasing digital lives allow use to not only remember the past, but harness that powerful information to help us lead better, healthier lives.

This article is a summary of a position paper by Ernesto Ramirez and Eric Hekler that will be discussed at the Personal Informatics in Practice workshop at CHI 2012 in Austin, TX on May 6, 2012. The workshop will be a gathering of researchers, designers, and practitioners exploring how to better support personal informatics in people’s everyday lives.

Kickstarter & Double Fine: A Seismic Shift? The detailed story of a game development project raising over $500,000 through Kickstarter.

Avoid misinterpreting your emotions. A beautiful post from Less Wrong about emotional intelligence – mood is weather, not climate, and can give us important insight if approached correctly.

Zeo Sleep Experiments. A really, really thorough examination by Gwern of sleep tracking and experiments using the Zeo.

9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn. Leo Babauta’s post on Zen Habits sounds like a great recipe for raising the next generation of self-experimenters. They’re not bad skills for adults to learn, either.

The age of big data. An interesting article about the rise of data and statistics.

How Dr. Hew Len healed a ward of mentally ill criminals with Ho’oponopono. An amazing story of healing yourself in order to heal others. I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you.

Thanks to Gary, Ernesto, Daniel Reda,  and Ioan Mitrea.

For those of you that were lucky enough to attend the first European Quantified Self conference this past November in Amsterdam you know how inspiring our good friend Laurie Frick can be. Laurie is a visual artist who meticulously and beautifully morphs her own self tracking data into wonderful pieces of art. Personally I find her large scale mood wall installations to be just jaw-dropping.

Phenomenal in her own right, imagine how surprised we were when Laurie emailed us earlier this week to tell us about an amazing story of a school teacher bringing self-tracking and visualization into her classroom. I’ll let Abigail Soto, an art teacher at De Valle High School in Austin Texas, tell you what happened in her own words:

24 hours in the life of a Del Valle student.

On February 1^st, 2012 I attended the energetic and interesting gallery talk of Laurie Frick at Women & Their Work in Austin. She counted and tracked her everyday life and inspired me to have my high school student track their lives. My high school is very high poverty and my students have very little opportunity to see art and art galleries. My students love hearing stories about artists and galleries and I couldn’t wait to share my experience from the gallery talk.

On February 2^nd I came to school and changed my lesson plan to include the students tracking their lives. I gave the students 24 rectangles in a line on a pre-printed sheet. I simply told them to track their previous 24 hours. One rectangle equaled one hour. The students collectively created a unified key with teenage issues. Blue signified sleep, red for school, pink for makeup, green for cell phone use etc… I did not give them any more requirements. My literal students started at a specific time and chronologically recorded their day while other students recreated their day in a more abstract manor.

The students really had to think about the length of their activities and many were shocked to find out how they spent their time. Students generated many great questions about the project and the artist. Conversations began about the amount of texting in the thousands and how much time is consumed with electronics. A great idea would be to illustrate and calculate the amount of text messages that are sent and received by each student. Some students text over 1000 times per day. Teacher and homework time can hardly compete with cell phones, television, and video games. Just by evaluating their actions they were able to visually see where they placed importance and how they should choose their time wisely.

Once each student completed their color chart they were placed in the hallway for the entire school to see. The key was placed to the side of the color charts and students walking down the hall stopped to figure out what the colors meant. The curiosity grew and non-art students were walking in my classroom asking if they could record their day. The overall experience has been very interesting. I have never been exposed to tracking and have never included tracking in an art lesson. I would like to take this lesson a step farther and do a complete lesson and art installation with my high school students. I think the possibilities are endless. Thank you Laurie Frick for expanding the possibilities in my classroom.

I think that there are a lot of lessons here that we as a community of users and makers can take away. Sometimes we get caught up in the gadgets and new technologies that we associated with real objective data collection. While those tools and web services are fun and provide us with new insights into our lives we mustn’t forget that the tools doesn’t make the tracking happen, it just makes it easier. I was asked at a conference this past week, “All those gadgets are nice, but what about the people who can’t afford them? What do you say to those people?” I think that implementing projects such as the one illustrated by Abigail Soto here is a way to bring people from all walks of life into a practice of self-tracking. Amazing insights can happen with a piece of paper, some lines, and a few colored markers. As an aside, during this same conference I met a woman whose 83 year old mother has been meticulously tracking her blood pressure and blood glucose, not with a fancy smartphone of wifi enabled device, but with good old pen and paper.

The second major lesson I took away from this project is that Quantified Self is a community in the truest sense of the world. We (and if you’re reading this that “we” includes you too) work hard to make sure that anyone and everyone feels that they can take part. Whether it is at a meetup, at a large conference, or in one-on-one discussions there is an amazing current of inclusivity, of togetherness, of intimate and abundant sharing. I’ve never once heard someone pipe up and say, “That’s not self-tracking.” As I read Abigail’s description and looked through those beautiful pieces of data visualization it made me proud that she and her students could feel included in this wonderful movement we are all a part of.

We’ll be highlighting more art projects and self-tracking experiments in future NFATW posts so please feel free to drop me a line and share your story or point out someone’s you’ve seen or read about. Our strength lies in our courage to share with each other.

Special thanks to CALIT2 for filming and editing the event video. You can find more videos from CALIT2 on the their Youtube channel here.

Q: How do you describe MyFitnessPal? What is it?

Lee: MyFitnessPal is a calorie counter that allows you to easily track your diet and exercise to learn more about what you are eating and how many calories you are consuming and burning. We have a website as well as mobile apps on every major platform, all of which seamlessly sync with one another so you can log at your computer or on your phone, whichever is most convenient. We also provide a variety of social networking tools so that you can easily motivate and receive support from friends and family, as well as stay informed of each other’s progress.

Q: What’s the back story? What led to it?

Lee: In 2005 my wife and I wanted to lose weight before our wedding. We went to see a trainer at 24 Hour Fitness, and he suggested that we count calories. He gave us a small book that had calorie counts for about 3,000 foods in it, and told us to write down everything that we ate. Being a tech guy, there was no way I was going to do this on paper, so I immediately threw the book away and looked for an online solution. There were already tons of online calorie counters available — I probably tried at least 15 myself — but to my amazement, none of them worked the way I thought they should work. They were all incredibly hard to use; I actually found it easier to track on paper than online. I was looking for a new project to work on, so I decided to write my own calorie counter — that’s how MyFitnessPal was born.

Soon my brother joined me. We’ve kept the team very small, while slowly building up a loyal following. We passed a million users a few years ago, and are still growing very rapidly.

Q: What impact has it had? What have you heard from users?

Lee: One of the best parts about working at MyFitnessPal is the messages we get from our users. I’d estimate that anywhere from 30-50% of the emails that we get are from people simply telling us how much they love the app, and how much it’s helped them lead a healthier life. People write in telling us that they’ve been trying to lose weight for 20 years, but nothing had worked until they tried MyFitnessPal. We hear from people who’ve been able to cancel surgeries, stop taking medications, fit into jeans they haven’t worn in years, or even things as simple as just being able to stand up without using their arms to push themselves up. We have thousands and thousands of members who’ve lost 100 pounds or more. We’ve even had people get married after meeting on MyFitnessPal.

It’s hard to generalize users’ experiences because we have so many users. And they vary widely: there are people who’ve never exercised, who would find a 15 minute walk difficult, and we have professional body builders.

Still, one thing stands out, which is that the biggest benefit is education. It’s amazing how little most people know about what they eat or the activities they perform, and once they start using the app, it’s eye-opening. They discover what they eat, how much, how often, the nutritional content of the food, and the impact of physical activity. They build up knowledge that stays with them even if they stop logging their foods. With this knowledge they can make their own decisions about what to change in their lives, what trade-offs are best for them. It’s not following some diet fad, but discovering what works for you.

Q: What makes it different, sets it apart?

Lee: We really pay little attention to other apps or the media. Rather we’re fanatically focused on our own users. We listen deeply to user feedback, but we don’t just do what they ask for. Instead we try to understand their real problem, and focus our work on the things that we’ve discovered really matter for losing weight.

We know losing weight is really hard and that tracking is a pain-in-the-neck. So, we really work hard to make our site and our app as easy to use as possible. We know that the easier and faster we can make logging your foods, the more likely you are to stick with it, and consequently, the more likely you are to reach your goals. As a tool maker, it’s our job to help make that process as easy as possible and remove every barrier we can to your success. I can’t really point to anything in particular about ease-of-use; it’s just something we focus on relentlessly and something that the team is just good at.

Q: What are you doing next? How do you see MyFitnessPal evolving?

Lee: Over the past year, we’ve worked hard on expanding the number of platforms on which MyFItnessPal is available. We’ve released apps for Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, and iPad. Though they are similar, the interfaces are tailored for each platform. Now that we’re available on most major platforms, we’ll be spending more time on improving our core logging tools. We’ve got a ton of ideas on how we can make calorie counting even faster and easier, so hopefully you’ll be seeing a lot of improvements in that area from us in 2012.

Q: Anything else you’d like to say?

Lee: If you’d like to keep up to date on the latest happenings on MyFitnessPal, you can like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/myfitnesspal or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/myfitnesspal.

Product: MyFitnessPal
Website: http://www.myfitnesspal.com
Platform: web, iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7
Price: Free

This is the 10th post in the “Toolmaker Talks” series. The QS blog features intrepid self-quantifiers and their stories: what did they do? how did they do it? and what have they learned?  In Toolmaker Talks we hear from QS enablers, those observing this QS activity and developing self-quantifying tools: what needs have they observed? what tools have they developed in response? and what have they learned from users’ experiences? If you are a “toolmaker” and want to participate in this series, contact Rajiv Mehta at rajivzume@gmail.com.

We’re excited to announce the third Quantified Self conference, to be held September 15-16, 2012 at Stanford University. Registration is now open, and please feel free to tweet… now!

Quantified Self 2012 is our third conference for users and tool makers interested in self-tracking systems. It will be a “working meeting” for the QS community (50 groups worldwide now), where we will gather, inspire, and learn from each other as we share and collaborate on self-tracking projects. This year we’re welcoming 600 attendees, so we are exploring the idea of specialized tracks to help the conference retain an intimate feel of like-minded people finding each other.

If you are an advanced user, designer, tech inventor, entrepreneur, journalist, scientist, or health professional, please join us for a weekend of collaboration and inspiration! Like last year, we will have some scholarship registrations available for people if registration price is a barrier. If you either need financial assistance or would like to sponsor a scholarship for a grateful self-tracker to attend the conference, write to me here. You can register here.

As always, any attendee is welcome to present their self-tracking story or lead a breakout session. Send in your proposed topic to me here. We will be announcing speakers and topics in the coming weeks, and we look forward to seeing you in Palo Alto!