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. We’re starting to get the point where we can give previews of the talks we’ll have…
Can you use technology to be more mindful? This question was at the core of a wonderful presentation by Nancy Dougherty at the second annual Quantified Self Conference: Nancy acknowledges at the start of her talk that QS is often thought to be mainly about technology. But not everybody sees it this way. Alex Carmichael,…
If you’ve been reading our posts for a while you’ve most likely noticed that we typically reference the Quantified Self community. If you’re not familiar with our structure and how to get involved you might be asking yourself, “How do I get involved with the QS community?”
Today the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released their latest findings in their ongoing research on the role of the Internet and technology in health and wellness. This latest report, Tracking for Health, is of particular interest to the Quantified Self community because it focuses on self-tracking. Thanks to Pew Associate Director,…
We are not the only ones curious about whether our activity level looks different when seen with different trackers. Bastian Greshake, co-founder of OpenSNP.org, has been comparing his FuelBand and his Fitbit for months. Here’s what he found.
Gary and I were inspired to start looking into activity tracker data by James Wolcott’s comment in his recent Vanity Fair Story: According to Fitbit, I took 7,116 steps on November 27; Jawbone has me at 2,192, a bit of a discrepancy. I prefer to believe Fitbit’s higher tally is the correct one, because that is the…
Here is a brief roundup of some of the things we’ve either collected or written about tracking mood since we first started paying attention to mood tracking back in 2008. Get Your Mood On Alex Carmichael and Robin Barooah have recently completed work on an excellent book detailing their experiences and knowledge gained from years of…
This feels very fast. A year ago there were a small number of Quantified Self devices, and a sense of high geekery. I walked into the Apple Store in Santa Monica last Wednesday and this is what I saw. There isn’t much that’s more mainstream than Apple retail at the moment, and I counted twenty-two…
Last week we brought you a look into some of the interesting Quantified Self tools that were debuted at CES. Here are a few more we noticed from the deluge of CES coverage. Thanks to MobiHealthNews, Gizmodo, Engadget and many QS friends for the tips. Withings Smart Body Analyzer (WS-50) The latest wireless scale from…
I’ve been curious about tracking physical activity since I was an undergraduate. I remember traveling to a local middle school with a researcher interested in how physical activity was taught in low-income Native American communities. Back then, the best we could do was have the children wear simple electromechanical pedometers to count their steps during…
A big part of what we do here at Quantified Self is support and promote our amazing meetup groups around the world. We have a wonderful network of meetups in over 70 cities in more than 15 countries around the world. We wouldn’t be able to post all the great videos and articles here on…
We talk about very frequently here on the QS website about tools, methods, and systems that help us understand ourselves. When it comes to the self there may be nothing more fundamental to understanding our objective ourness than our basic genetic makeup. Many of you have probably undergone or have thought of using Direct-To-Consumer genetic…
Here at Quantified Self we talk about living with numbers. Look a few inches above these words and it’s right there in our four-word tagline: self knowledge through numbers. Information, increasingly numerical information, is becoming a driving force in the world. We’re surrounded by numerical representations of ourselves in almost all aspects of our lives. Probably no…
I’m typing this post while flying back to Southern California after spending a few days at a “Big Data” conference in San Francisco. One of the best things about the conference was meeting the subject of today’s round of Numbers From Around the Web. I first stumbled upon Bastian because he’s the main instigator and…
“How do you feel right now?” Such a short question can lead us toward profound insights into our lives. But how do we ask ourselves that question? How do we keep track of our answers? There are many different ideas out there about how to tackle this seemingly simple question. Many of them focus on…
This guest post comes to us courtesy of Chris Hall, our wonderful Louisville Meetup organizer. Two weeks ago I threw a Quantified Self Meetup in beautiful downtown Louisville, and I’m writing this post, two weeks later because I’ve finally come down from the experience. We had a total of four speakers and 13 people show up to the…
Typically when the Quantified Self-er talks about using photography and image capture for self-tracking they’re talking about taking pictures of their food. Pictures are a very powerful way to capture information for better understanding, you know, they are worth a thousand words. On the blog here we’ve also highlighted a few really interesting projects that take…
This post is being updated as more recaps and blog posts come in. On September 15-16th, 600 QS enthusiasts gathered together for our third Quantified Self conference. Here are some quick highlights collected from all of you who were there. Pictures are always fun! Check out the QS2012 Flickr pool, and a few for flavor…
At some point, we’ve all been frustrated with our experiences interacting with the medical community. This isn’t a big secret, especially here in the United States. Many individuals involved in QS meetups around the world gravitate towards news tools and data sources that let them understand and interact with health-related data in news ways. Whether…
Jana Beck was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 19 years old and has been interested in tracking her health ever since. Last year when she received a continuous blood glucose monitor she decided to take a more active role in understand what was effecting her blood glucose levels and insulin dosing. Spurred by reading…
