Show&Tell Talks About Healthcare Practices
Quantified Self practices are changing the way people manage their health. Members of the QS community are changing the way they interact and talk to their doctors, and healthcare professionals are implementing self-tracking principles in their own practices. Below is a list of talks given at QS events that show how QS is changing the way healthcare works for people.
Sara Riggare had her first symptoms of Parkinson’s in 1984 when she was 13 years old. In this video, she talks about the medications that helps her to move, think, and function. She shares how she keeps up with her progressive neurological illness by tweaking and re-tweaking her medications through tracking, so she doesn’t have to take the generic prescription. The medications are essential to live her life, but she has learned that the dosing can be modified to allow her to still feel like herself.
Dana Lewis became a reluctant self-tracker at the age of 14 when she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Dana and her partner Scott Leibrand have been developing a DIY artificial pancreas that is built on top of the data flows from Dana’s continuous glucose monitor. In this talk, she describes the role that access to data plays in their DIY pancreas, with immediate and profoundly positive effects on her life. She also explains why she’s constantly pushing for patients to stop waiting for solutions and go the DIY route.
Amy Edgar founded a clinical practice in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that treats over 2,500 children and families each year. She collects traditional clinical data about her patients, but the magic happens when her data meets the data they collect about themselves. With permission from patients and families, Amy shares some of their self-tracking stories — about tracking sleep, tracking menstruation, and tracking activity — and talks about how sharing data can shift the dynamic in clinical relationships away from mere treatment and toward a more powerful co-creation of health.
Four years ago, Ari Meisel was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. After a couple years of intense pain, sixteen pills a day, and another visit to the hospital, he decided to take control of his pain. So he started to track everything and eventually cured himself of Crohn’s disease by experimenting with some unusual supplements, nutrition and fitness regimens. In this talk, Ari discusses what he learned from his experiment and shares his tracking regimen.
Chris Bartley, an engineering consultant, felt like a zombie. So over the course of 18 months, he tried taking supplements and medications and changing his diet. He started a spreadsheet with five columns to track his wellness, medications and diet. He saw no improvement and decided to write a thesis on himself. He took the data and decomposed it into indicated variables.
Andreas Schreiber is a scientist at the German Space Agency where he travels a lot, attends a lot of conferences all over the world, and has a lot of stress which led to him having a stroke in 2009. Afterward, he started tracking his vital signs, sleep, and weight. In this talk, he discusses how he tested various changes to help him stay healthy.