Nathan Yau over at Flowing Data started a fascinating discussion last week. He asked his readers why they collect data about themselves, what they’ve learned from it, or why they don’t collect any data at all. 23 people answered the call and shared their insights. There are many positive self-discovery comments like the stories we…
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…
I’d love your feedback on this question. Last Friday morning, I met with Aman Bhandari in President Obama’s Chief Technology Office. It was an intense 45 minutes! Aman is coordinating the Community Health Data Initiative, which involves taking the datasets that HHS has recently released to the public, incorporating other datasets through partnerships, and inspiring…
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…
Jeff Heer of Stanford and Nathan Yau of FlowingData give their insight on the easiest tools available for beginners to create jaw-dropping infographics.
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…
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…
Do you have a story about how your self-tracking project has affected your life? If so, I’d like to hear it. I’m working on a long magazine story about the Quantified Self, much more detailed than the short essay published in Wired last year. (“Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life“) For this story I’m…
Do you want to be more creative? Justin Wehr does, and he sent in this question for the QS advisory board. ———- Name: Justin Wehr Purpose: My objective is to measure creative thoughts so I can figure out how to maximize them. Variables tracked: I have some variables related to this, but not enough. For…
Non Invasive Health Monitoring with mHealth View more documents from Bart Collet. Is health going mobile? It certainly seems so. Belgian blogger Bart Collet posted this fantastic compilation of tools and services for mobile health. Many of the companies in this presentation I hadn’t ever heard of before, which goes to show how quickly this…
I have been participating in the QS Show & Tell meetings since they started. What those of us in the QS are working on today, and the interest we take in tracking and analyzing all aspects of our lives, is not quite mainstream yet. But many of us feel that like those pioneers in the…
If you make a change to your daily routine or try a new medication, how do you know if it is working? This was the question Bard sent in for the QS Scientific Advisory Board. His challenge was met by Neil Rubens, Teresa Lunt and David Goldberg. Read Bard’s question and their answers below. And if…
Jeremy Johnson sent in this question for the illustrious QS Scientific Advisory Board, so we set about finding an answer for him. Gordon Bell and Seth Roberts responded with lightning speed! Jeremy’s question and their answers are below. If you have a question about your self-tracking that you’d like some help with, let me know….
With the explosion of microblogging, tweeting, and status updates, it is clear that embedding personal metrics in social tools is on the tips of our fingers and is a natural extension to the personal toolbox. This post explores the opportunity of OHME (Open Mobile Health Exchange), a first-mover in the new world of Microsyntax, and a new…
Thoughts on treating access to personal data in the same way as network permissions – as a system that permits a customizable range of options from full, real-time access to complete denial.
You “own” your own health data. That is clear if you generate it yourself, as self-trackers do. But even when others generate health data for you, you should have full access and “ownership” of it. They are only “borrowing” the data. But not every health care provider makes it easy to get cheap access to…
I recently saw Alvaro Fernandez of sharpbrains.com speak at eTech 2009, the O’Reilly emerging technology conference. Fernandez is a Stanford MBA working as a market researcher focused on the “brain fitness” industry. Not surprisingly, he posts quite a bit about commercial opportunities, and publishes a newsletter with surveys, estimates, and forecasts about the state of…
The QS blog, as is obvious to anybody who glances at it, is hosted on kk.org, the web site of my friend and QS Show&Tell co-host Kevin Kelly. Here is a link to Kevin’s recent post on the inevitable public status of all individual human genomes. It is a counterintuitive idea, persuasively argued. Kevin focuses…
The other night at the QS Show&Tell a few of us got into a conversation about the potential use of self-tracking data in the development of simulations of the self. Of course all models are simulations in a sense, but the discussion reminded me of a terrific bit of speculation from Nature a few years…
