Food. It’s a wonderful social glue that binds people and cultures together in common practices of preparation, presentation, and consumption. It also happens to be a behavior perfectly positioned for self-tracking. Have I ate too much? Did I get enough vitamins? Am I drinking enough water? Am I drinking too much beer? These introspections can…
A quick post here to highlight some interesting developments in the heart rate tracking space. Tracking and understanding heart rate has been a cornerstone of self-tracking since, well since someone put two fingers on their neck and decided to write down how many pulses they felt. We’ve come a long way from that point. If…
We’re excited to share some great news with our Quantified Self community: Buster Benson, one of the most inspring tool makers and self-trackers we know, will be giving a plenary talk about his experiences and adventures in lifelogging at the upcoming Quantified Self European Conference. Buster has long been a friend and an inspiration to…
How can I lead a happier life? I’m sure this is something we’ve all asked ourselves. Maybe it was during a turn through doldrums or maybe you asked yourself how you could sustain your happiness during a moment of joy. Whatever the case happiness, and by extension mood tracking, has been at the forefront of engaging in…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Apr 14, 2013
Data visualization theorist and pioneer, Edward Tufte, popularized the use of sparklines, which he describes as “datawords: data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.” Learn to display your own quantitative data to Twitter with a Sparktweet.
We are only four short weeks away from hosting our second Quantified Self European Conference and our excitement is building as we receive more previews of the talks and presentations we’ll be hosting. As you can probably guess, putting on a conference can be a stressful endeavor. Luckily stress tracking and management has been the…
We want to better serve our community. To that end, we’ve created a short survey to to help us understand how we can use this website to support you and your Quantified Self endeavors. We have some ideas about where this website can go, but we want to hear from our community! Please take a…
By being able to see my ideas and see how they’re connected to each other, I’m able to think about myself in new ways. Amy Robinson is curious. That curiosity led her to think very deeply about her curiosity. What was she curious about? Where do her ideas come from? What inspires her? In this…
In this short Ignite talk, Dave Marvit from Fujitsu Labs of America talks about a prototype system he is developing to track stress and monitoring stressful events in veterans with PTSD. The Sprout system brings in and syncs multiple data streams allowing researchers, clinicians, and individuals to develop a deeper insight into what’s really happening during…
Today’s post comes to us from Andrew Paulus, a member of the New York QS Meetup group. QS Meetups are a great time to see demos, hear interesting show & tells, and talk to a few people after. With hundreds of members just in the local New York group it is impossible to meet everyone…
Awais Hussain is a student at Harvard, and he found himself asking the age-old question, “Where does my time go?” Using his online calendar Awais started tracking his daily activities. This tracking has given him some interesting insights into how he really works and accomplishes tasks. Watch this great talk to hear more about what…
This guest post comes to us from QS Los Angeles member, Mark Krynsky. I went to the Los Angeles Quantified Self Meetup meeting on March 7th and had a fantastic time meeting like-minded people that are all willing to experiment and share their experiences. The meetup was held at the artisanal engineering studios of the…
(Co-written with Gary Wolf) In January we started asking ourselves, “How many people self-track?” It was an interesting question that stemmed from our discussion with Susannah Fox about the recent Pew report on Tracking for Health. Here’s a quick recap of the discussion so far. The astute Brian Dolan of MobiHealthNews suggested that the Pew…
We’ve posted some great talks by Amelia Greenhall here on the blog and we’re excited to bring you another insightful presentation. Last year Amelia gave a wonderful talk about her weight loss journey and the power of using running averages. In this updated talk Amelia gives a more in-depth look about how using a 10-day moving…
Ari Berwaldt wanted to better understand how his sleep affected his mental performance. In this great talk Ari explains his insights from tracking his cognitive skills using Quantified Mind and some surprising results about the lack of correlation between his Zeo data and his mental performance. Make sure to keep watching as Ari also explains…
Editors Note: The method outlined below no longer functions. We are keeping it up for archival purposes. (3/22/19) Editors Note: We’ve updated this post to reflect Google’s move to a new version of their spreadsheet application. The newest version no longer support the Script Gallery mentioned here. We have included a link in the instruction…
A month ago we showed you what we thought was the quintessential example of how Quantified Self is becoming more of a mainstream activity. During a trip to the Apple store we identified over 20 different Quantified Self devices. Another outing led me into one of the largest consumer electronics stores in the US: Best Buy. Here,…
The second QS European 2013 Conference is coming up. We run our QS global meetings as “carefully curated unconferences,” meaning that we make the program out of ideas and suggestions from the registrants, with a lot of thoughtful back-and-forth in advance. Today we’re highlighting Rain Ashford. Rain is currently a researcher in the Art and Computational Technology…
“I never thought I would be getting into this business.” This is the first sentence in a mind-expanding talk by Larry Smarr about his self-tracking journey. In 1999 Larry moved from Illinois to La Jolla, CA to take a position at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Like most Southern California transplants he quickly…
