Hind Hobeika is a swimmer and an engineer from Beirut. She wanted to monitor her heart rate while she was swimming, so she built goggles that sense and display her heart rate in real time. It’s called the Butterfleye Project. In this great talk below, she describes how she designed and assembled the goggles, the…
Andy Leigh wanted to row around the world from his bedroom. Why? To lose weight and to do some kind of project with the open source hardware Arduino. He chose rowing because it’s a low-impact activity that he can do with his injury. But manual tracking in a spreadsheet was too cumbersome. In the video…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 19, 2012
This is the first time we’ve had video of a new meetup’s very first gathering! Ciaran Lyons started QS Singapore, and recorded his introductory remarks as well as his own self-tracking story. Great to watch for people new to QS or thinking of starting a meetup group. Thanks Ciaran!
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…
Sacha Chua started tracking time to find out where she was spending time and how she might change her patterns. In the video below, she explains what she learned, including how quickly her interests change, how she chooses to break down her time, and how the tracking helps her focus. Be sure to check out…
In 2006, PhD student Ian Li created Moodjam to let people track their moods in color. At the QS Europe conference last November, he met artist Laurie Frick, who creates beautiful works of art from her data. She mentioned that she was using Moodjam, and this inspired Ian to make a new version of it! In the video…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 11, 2012
We’re excited to announce that the videos from the Quantified Self Europe conference in Amsterdam are starting to come online! I’ll be posting them individually here on the blog, but if you can’t wait for that, you can find some of them here on Vimeo. Also, QS Amsterdam member Kees Plattel put together this beautiful…
I had the great pleasure of attending a QS meetup in Los Angeles this past weekend, hosted by Eric Blue. There was a great group there, 30 or so folks. One great comment in the introductions was from someone near the end of the circle saying, “This is totally blowing my mind!” Eric has put…
Ewart de Visser had a friend who “didn’t like the whole work thing” and started speculating on foreign currencies. When Ewart asked him how much he was losing in his first few months, his friend wasn’t sure, so they set up a spreadsheet to start tracking his trading performance. In the video below, Ewart describes…
Adam Loving wanted a very lightweight way to track what he did each day, without tweeting it to the world. He built a simple system where he can tell Siri what he did, and it gets recorded in a database. Some data gets automatically entered through if this then that. Adam found that it has…
Alan Bachers is an expert in neurofeedback training, which he comfortingly describes as helping the brain learn how to calibrate itself. He suggests that this training accelerates the process of getting into meditative or other desirable mental states, and can possibly help a medicated brain learn to function without medication. In the video below, he…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jan 29, 2012
QS founder Gary Wolf speaks at the Silicon Valley QS meetup group, giving a meta look at what Quantified Self is about, followed by a personal show&tell about his meditation data.
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jan 21, 2012
Anyone who has presented their work at a Quantified Self conference will already know the amazing Ernesto Ramirez. Ernesto is a doctoral student at UC San Diego’s Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, a leader of the San Diego QS Show&Tell meetup group, a regular blogger here, and a positive force inspiring people to…
Thomas Pickard has had Restless Legs Syndrome for the past thirty years, but was only diagnosed ten years ago. Since his diagnosis, he has experimented with drug dosage, had his genome partially sequenced, and started a RLS/Niacin study on Genomera. In the video below, Thomas talks about what he learned about his sleep, blood and…
This is a guest post from Ken Snyder of Quantified Self London. Thanks Ken! — I have personally found Magnesium to be a great tool in getting better sleep, although I believe a more common use is to help get more sleep. In any event, I thought it would be interesting to hear from the…
Robby MacDonell doesn’t own a car, so he gets around on public transportation and on foot. He spent one month tracking his use of various modes of transportation, using the app MyTracks. In the video below, Robby talks about how he evaluated the different location-tracking tools, how he built his own custom interactive Google map, what…
