What is Quantified Self?

The Quantified Self is an international community of users and makers of self-tracking tools who share an interest in “self-knowledge through numbers.” If you are tracking for any reason — to answer a health question, achieve a goal, explore an idea, or simply because you are curious — you can find help and support here.

How to Participate

If you are looking for advice about how to get started with a self-tracking project, visit our Get Started page. If you’re already doing a project and are trying to learn more from it, please consider presenting at a QS event or starting a Project Log on the QS Forum. Even if you are still at an early phase, and even if you aren’t sure if you’ve “really learned anything” yet, sharing your project with knowledgeable and interested peers is a great way to refine your thinking, and it can sometimes elicit advice the proves to be crucial to your next steps. We’re always interested in hearing about your work, so if you are documenting your project in other ways, feel free to send us a note. You can subscribe to our community newsletter, Everyday Science, that includes links to projects that catch our interest.

Engaging with QS Research and Advocacy

Most Quantified Self projects are driven by individual questions, but since 2012, leaders in the Quantified Self community have also been working closely with public health experts, policymakers, and research scientists to advance discovery through increasing access to data. Questions we’re currently interested in include:

  • How can we improve access to our own data?
  • How can we share our data in a way that protects our privacy and individual agency?
  • How can our self-tracking instrumentation, including wearables, analytics platforms, and data stores, be designed to better help us answer a broader range of questions about ourselves?

For a list of current and past projects, go the Learn How We Work section of this site.

Support

The Quantified Self community is supported by a team headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with key collaborators working in cities around the world including Portland, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. Our work is funded through Article 27, a nonprofit whose mission is to support the human right to participate in science. If you share this aim, as a funder, developer, researcher, or community member, please get in touch. We are happy to talk about how we can help.