Steven Jonas

March 28, 2017

Last week the QS Bay Area group got together for an evening of Show&Tell talks at the Institute For The Future in Palo Alto. There were talks on gut health, time management, statistics and a self-experimentation lab.

The first talk was from Karl Heilbron about a simple experiment where he supplemented his diet with probiotics and had uBiome samples taken before and after. He was surprised to learn that the probiotics had little to no effect. He decided that, for now, it didn’t make sense to keep paying for them.

What I love about this project is how it reflects how people are using their data in their lives. Karl didn’t prove that probiotics don’t have an impact. He gathered some data, and it didn’t show enough evidence to justify continued taking of the supplement.

Slide from Karl Heilbron’s talk

Click to watch the video of Karl’s talk

Eric Mann spoke about his attempt to manage his work time better. He used a series of scripts to get his calendar data into Excel and created a dashboard that gave him insight into where he’s spending his time, with whom, and whether it’s helping with his work goals.

Slide from Eric Mann’s talk

Click to watch Eric Mann’s talk

Eric J. Daza is a biostatistician how helps researchers design their studies and analyze their data, so it was interesting to hear his perspective on principles for analyzing the smaller data sets that make up QS data.

Slide from Eric J. Daza’s talk

Click to watch Eric J. Daza’s talk

The last talk came from Mike Snyder, one of the most interesting and innovative scientists currently using self-collected data to make new discoveries. A recently published paper out of Mike’s lab: Tracking Physiomes and Activity Using Wearable Biosensors Reveals Useful Health-Related Information, by Xiao Li, Jessilyn Dunn, and Denis Salins, uses two years of Mike’s extremely detailed self-tracking data (backed up with group research) to show how heart rate data can predict sickness before symptoms appear.

Slide from Mike Snyder’s talk

Click to watch Mike Snyder’s talk

If you live in the Bay Area and want to know when the next QS event is happening, join the group on Meetup!

Join us at QS17

Our next conference is June 17-18 in Amsterdam. It’s the perfect event to see the latest self-experiments, discuss the most interesting topics in personal data, and meet the most fascinating people in the Quantified Self community. There are a limited number of tickets. We can’t wait to see you there.