Sam, age 9, is the son of my Wired colleague Fred Vogelstein and his wife Evelyn Nussenbaum. Last year, Fred published a remarkable story in the New York Times magazine, Epilepsy’s Big Fat Miracle, about how he and Evelyn treat Sam’s epilepsy with a high fat and nearly zero carbohydrate diet. In an average week,…
At tomorrow night’s Bay Area Quantified Self Show&Tell, we are going to focus on transportation, consumption, and energy. Our meeting is in the incredible Autodesk design gallery at One Market Street, and there are some terrific talks planned. Some of the talks will be about tracking the things we buy, and in anticipation of this,…
Ethan Zuckerman, the co-founder of Global Voices and the writer of a wonderful blog called my heart’s in accra is doing an experiment, and is asking for advice and collaborators. The experiment is to track his “media diet.” The project is related to Ethan’s argument that we don’t have very reliable intuitions about the kind…
For many of us, the answer seems obvious: why do something manually when you can automate it? But when it comes to personal data, automation involves a trade-off. As Project HealthDesign‘s principal investigator Anind K. Dey points out in this blog post, automation suffers from the drawback of “out of sight, out of mind.” (Dey…
Earlier this summer Alexandra Carmichael, who is the founder of CureTogether as well as our director here at the Quantified Self, was in Washington for a meeting in President Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). When Alex came back she posted a report about her meeting here on the blog, and invited us…
On of the most well known QS devices is the Withings WiFi body scale. Automatically transmitting weight to a computer or mobile phone, the scale is a good example of a solid, mainstream approach to self-tracking. But I was curious recently to see how many people are taking advantage of the ability to publicly tweet…
Many of us are bothered by the conflict between wanting to take advantage of web services for the management of personal data and our desire to have all of this data on a local drive. Poyozo is a new service that scrapes personal data and returns it “home.”
Last March some UC San Diego researchers published a nice paper called Thick Film textile-based amperometric sensors and biosensors that gets into some of the details of printing biometric sensors on clothing. In this charming video, a UCSD undergraduate prints a sample biometric sensor on fabric. Below is an excerpt from the UCSD press release…
Earlier this week I organized an open invite brown bag lunch in San Francisco with HCI researcher Ian Li. We had a lively discussion of some leading edge issues in application design of self-tracking systems, with an emphasis on what new users might expect, want, and experience. Ian has been doing a lot of prototype…
Many of those who have been involved with the Quantified Self since we started blogging and having our Show&Tell meetings already know Alexandra Carmichael. Alex is the co-founder of the collaborative health research site, CureTogether, a colleague of our friends at the Institute for the Future, a regular blogger on personal data topics, and a…
Brandon Hansen posts at Jalopnik.com on his year-long project to find out if he could speed his commute by analyzing the influence of his departure time, local school schedule, and other factors. Tired of the typically inefficient and contradictory workplace chatter on the subject — and feeling the pull of a mild worksheet obsession —…
My recent story about self-tracking in the New York Times magazine attracted many thoughtful comments. I found myself especially interested in the critical comments, some of which had an underlying tone of anguish. For instance, “BT” in Ohio wrote: How many of the “problems” in ourselves and our lives that these new machines will track…
Here the fabulous Dr. Laird displays some of his gadgets for measuring human behavior, sure to inspire Quantified Self tinkerers and historians. Thanks to Megan and Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Library for helping do some archeology on this topic. More fun references to come… (The movie, which was sponsored by General Motors, turns into…
Here are some helpful links if you are new to this blog. QS is a collaboration of users and tool makers interested in self-knowledge through self-tracking. For more on this, go to our About page. Along with posting to this group blog, we hold regular “Show&Tell” meetings where you can hear short, interesting accounts of…
Over the weekend some of the most interesting designers working in the field of personal informatics gathered in Atlanta in advance of the ACM conference on human-computer interaction. At a workshop called “Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One’s Life,” they presented research proposals and tentative conclusions about the future of personal informatics…
Walter Mischel I thought this might interest QS friends who are thinking about extremely simple systems of self-assessment. It is a paragraph about the influence of Walter Mischel that comes from the autobiographical sketch of Daniel Kahneman, on the occasion of his Nobel prize. I post this simply for inspiration, in case it is useful…
At QS Show&Tell #12 Seth Roberts quickly showed some of his latest results from his fascinating cognition experiments. We will have video of Seth’s talk up soon, but in the meantime I wanted to link to some additional explanation Seth has posted on his blog. First, some background. At QS Show&Tell #2, Tim Lundeen described…
We are starting to get lots of email about new QS products, trackers, businesses, and web sites: way more than I can intelligently discuss. I am going to start posting links to more or less everything I hear about, so that QS readers can take a glance if they are interested. If you like something…
QS is not going to become another health care blog, but I wanted to promote these excellent slides out of the comments section from the previous post on Quantified Self business models. Rajiv Mehta and Hugh Dubberly gave a talk recently that will be valuable to anybody thinking about QS in the context of health….
Last Tuesday I received an invitation from Esther Dyson and Jen McCabe to attend a small, private workshop on the business side of user-generated health. The workshop was to be held the very next day. Despite this short notice, more than 30 people showed up, some of whom flew across the country to attend. Their…
