Today’s post comes to us from Dawn Nafus and Robin Barooah. Together they led an amazing breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference on the topic of understanding and mapping data access. We have a longstanding interest in observing and communicating how data moves in and out of the self-tracking systems we use…
Alex Tarling starting using the Mappiness app to track his happiness along with other contextual data. Over time the ritual of having to ask himself, “How happy am I?” three times a day started to get him thinking about how he thought about his own happiness and what that meant to him. In this talk,…
Today’s post comes to us from Brian Crain. Brian has been testing different productivity methods for over three years. After his great show&tell talk desrcribing how he tracks his own productivity he led a breakout session on the topic. This led to interesting dicussion around how people tracked themselves and what they wish they could track better. You’re…
Four years ago Morris Villarroel was inspired to start writing things down. He started with a simple Muji notebook and begun adding some structure such as daily logs, life events, and review of books and articles he had read. In the process of filling out over 130 journals his process has evolved to include journaling…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jun 22, 2014
Today’s post comes to us from Cathal Gurrin, Rami Albatal, Dan Berglund, and Daniel Hamngren. Cathal and Rami are researchers at Dublin City University and Daniel and Dan work at Narrative, makers of a small lifelogging camera and application. Together, they led an interesting breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference on photo lifelogging and…
Jan-Geert Munneke has had an issue with snoring for quite a while. He started off his self-tracking journey by tracking his snoring with the Snore Lab app. Having this data led him to think about how he could understand what was going on while he was sleeping. So, he decided to incorporate more sensors to…
There are many people in the QS community who are fascinated by understanding productivity. We’ve featured many different talks that explore different methods for tracking and hopefully improving productivity. At the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference we were happy to continue this exploration with a show&tell talk by Brian Crain. Brian has been thinking about…
Today’s post comes to us from Josh Berson. Josh is a anthropologist and researcher at the Max Plank Institute. In the fall of 2014 Josh and his colleagues will be embarking on an ambitious research program to explore how we understand and engage in activity and rest. This research project, housed at the Hub at Wellcome Collection, is…
Steve Dean is the co-organizer of our New York City QS meetup group. He’s also an avid self-tracker, using different methods and tools to understand his life. About three years ago Steve started to experience inflammation along his eyelids. After seeing a dermatologist and being diagnosed with atopic dermatitis he was prescribed a treatment regiment….
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jun 15, 2014
This is a visualization of one month of my blood sugar readings from October 2012. I see that my control was generally good, with high blood sugars happening most often around midnight (at the top of the circle). -Doug Kanter Richard Bernstein, an engineer with diabetes, pioneered home blood glucose monitoring. What he learned about…
Today’s post comes to us from Dana Greenfield. We asked Dana and the great QS scholar and thinker, Whitney Erin Boesel, to lead a breakout session on tracking grief and mood at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Mood tracking is common in the QS community, and both Dana and Whitney have extensive experiences attempting to…
Kay Stoner has a long history of battling chronic health issues, but what bothers her the most is her experience with frequent headaches. Kay has been tracking her headaches since 2007 after she had a hard time communicating with her healthcare providers. What followed were years of attempting different types of methods of tracking, including…
Today’s post comes to us from Kouris Kalligas and Erik Haukebø, who led the Data Aggregators breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Data aggregations methods and platforms are becoming commonplace as the range of data collection tools continues to grow. Individuals are continually looking for ways to combine and analyze disparate data…
Max Gotzler wasn’t feeling his best during a long German winter. He decided to visit his physician to see if anything might be going on. This included various blood and micronutrient tests. When he received his results he noticed that his testosterone levels were on the low end of the acceptable range. Intrigued by this,…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Jun 8, 2014
What does it mean to explore and understand your self-collected data? What should tools and sources think about to support exploration and data-driven introspection? Anne Wright has been working on understanding and answering these questions for the last few years while working on the Fluxtream project. In this short talk from the 2014 Quantified Self…
Back in 2012 we first heard about a neat little project developed by Stan James called Lifeslice. It’s a simple application that tracks what you’re doing with your computer by taking a photo of you, a screen capture, and current location (all stored locally on your machine). Stan kept working on the project adding tweaks…
Today’s post comes to us from Steven Jonas who led the Spaced Repetition breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Spaced repetition is a common topic in the Quantified Self community and we’ve seen great examples from Jeopardy champion Roger Craig and Steven. In this breakout session, conference attendees discussed reasons for using spaced repetition,…
