Blog

Astronauts

February 23, 2023

We The Scientists, a new book by Amy Dockser Marcus, tells the story of a group of families who force research attention on a rare disease

Community Trial of Potassium for Weight Loss

October 21, 2022

There’s a lot to like about this this new community trial of potassium for weight loss from Slime Mold Time Mold. The idea comes from a previous, much more difficult community trial they organized: Eat nothing but potatoes, oil, and seasonings for 30 days.

Anne Wright & Personal Science

April 14, 2022

This animation summarizes Anne Wright’s description of how a person coping with chronic health issues progresses through the process of self-research. Click through to learn how to get early access to our book, “Personal Science: Learning to Observe.”

Measuring Mood and Emotion

August 11, 2021

A post discussing the nuances behind designing experiments that track mood, including insights into the debate as to whether negative and positive emotions should be measured as polar opposite or considered states that can be experienced at the same time.

2nd Annual Keating Memorial Show&Tell Talks

July 22, 2021

You’re invited to attend the 2nd Annual Steven Keating Memorial Self-Research Talks. This ninety minute online meeting will present 4 first person self-research talks with discussion and Q&A. Time: August 12, 2021, 10:00 am Pacific Time (US and Canada)/19:00 CDT (Europe) This meeting will take place online in Zoom. We’ll have our regular show&tell format…

Self-tracking & drugs

July 21, 2021

In two separate QS Show&Tell talks, Ahnjili ZhuParris and Janet Chang attempt to figure out the effect of drugs on their daily life, paying especially close attention to the influence of dose on mood, anxiety, and productivity.

The Keating Memorial Self Research Group

February 6, 2021

Would you like to get help with your self-research project from an active, experienced group of peers? You’re invited to join the Keating Memorial Self Research group. We meet every Thursday at 10am Pacific time. You can find the agenda, notes & links in the full post.

Self-Registration: A person-centered approach to recording symptoms, observations, and outcomes.

August 11, 2020

If we want to know about typical and atypical symptoms of COVID-19, why wait until people show up at the doctors’ office or emergency room and then ask them to tell us: When did you first feel sick? It’s reasonable to want to build on top of our everyday tools, and track the development of the disease as it occurs. I want to underline what tends to be forgotten in our product-obsessed culture: these tools are not simply measurement instruments and wearables; they include the social and cognitive tools individuals are using to understand and manage their own health.

Personal Science Conversations #3: “The Patient Experience”

July 13, 2020

In the third episode of Personal Science Conversations, Sara Riggare, Gary Wolf, Thomas Blomseth Christiansen and Steven Jonas discuss how the personal science intersects with the patient experience. Drawing heavily on Sara’s experience as a person with Parkinson’s in the Swedish healthcare system, we look at how individuals can use their personal observations to inform…

Series
Personal Science Conversations  

A Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics Systems

July 3, 2020

In 2010 Ian Li, Anind Dey, and Jodi Forlizzi published a prescient paper called “A Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics Systems” based on interviews in the Quantified Self community. It was a prescient description of an emerging practice.

A Framework for Personal Science

July 2, 2020

Self-tracking. Self-experiment. N-of-1 methods. Single subject research. The kinds of self-research seen in the Quantified Self community are described by a thicket of labels. In a perspective article recently published in Frontiers in Computer Science, Gary Wolf and Martijn de Groot attempt to provide a clear definition and framework for research.

QS Show & Tell — June 16 2020

June 16, 2020

Thank you to everybody who came and presented! This is a list of links and resources that may be helpful if are interested in the projects presented tonight. General Resources Intro Slides: QS Show&Tell Welcome June 16 2020 Open Humans: openhumans.org Quantified Flu: quantifiedflu.org Quantified Self Forum: forum.quantifiedself.com Presenter Links Bob Troia: Quantified Bob Mad…

Self-Tracking For COVID-19

May 27, 2020

Explore how you can get advance warning of sickness onset using simple analysis of your self-tracking data by joining Quantified Flu.

Interview: Mad Ball of Open Humans

March 2, 2020

Mad Ball was a rising scientist at Harvard who switched to build a nonprofit foundation creating tools for the future of self research: “I wanted to do things that would not have happened otherwise had I not been present to question those boundaries. What we’re doing, nobody else is doing.”