Just released – Gary Wolf’s podcast with Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn of the Yi-Tan Technology Community. Here’s the description, and the audio below: We’ve talked about Participatory Medicine and DIY in various ways, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what people are starting to do by collecting and sharing their health-related information. If…
Hello, everyone! Last summer, we conducted a study about people’s experiences using personal informatics tools to collect and reflect on data about themselves. This summer, we are running a more focused study to explore how people reflect on their personal informatics data. The study consists of two one-hour interviews (a few weeks apart) at Carnegie…
What happens when self-tracking and games are pervasive? Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design and instructor at Carnegie Mellon University, gave a shocking talk at the 2010 Dice Summit. With dark enthusiasm, he explored the question: if passive sensors become ubiquitous in the world around us, will everyday life turn into a…
Photo Credit: Hesam Khoshneviss No, that’s not me in the picture. But I would love one of these! Researchers at Concordia University and the University of London have created ‘smart’ clothing, with embedded wireless biosensors that detect your mood and play voices and videos of people you want to hear when you’re feeling sad, upset,…
What do you get when you mashup open health data, government officials, and app developers? A “river of mojo” for health innovation. These are the words of Todd Park, CTO of HHS, who recently instigated the release of several government health datasets for public analysis. Park revved up the audience at the sold-out Community Health…
The Cophenhagen Wheel, a project of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, transforms an everyday bike into “a hybrid e-bike that provides feedback on pollution, traffic congestion and road conditions in real-time.” And yes, that’s an iPhone mounted on the handlebars. Thanks to Nathan Yau of FlowingData for the heads-up on this. Nathan writes: The wheel stores…
A number of people in the Quantified Self community have been asking me about starting companies: How do I find a co-founder that complements my skills? What business model do I use? Can I even make my idea into a business at all? I wish I had all the answers. It’s definitely a complex path…
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…
Jeff Heer does it again. A Stanford professor in Human-Computer Interaction and Quantified Self advisor on data visualization, Heer and his colleagues Mike Bostock and Vadim Ogievetsky have put together a terrific guide to the various kinds of data visualization, and when and how to use each one. They call their guide A Tour through…
Joseph Jackson has an announcement to make. He attended the last Bay Area QS Show &Tell meetup and told the group about the Open Science Summit he’s organizing in Berkeley this summer. In his words: Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0 July 29-31 International House Berkeley opensciencesummit.com Synthetic Biology,…
A crowd formed around me at the last Bay Area Quantified Self meetup as I showed around this bandage-shaped tracker and bright green pills with microchips on them. Questions showered me: What does it track? Does it have a battery? How does it work? Unfortunately I didn’t have all the answers. This new device was…
You’re biased. I’m biased. We’re all biased when it comes to thinking, remembering, being social, and making decisions. Understanding the different cognitive biases we have can help us design and interpret experiments, interact with each other, and make healthy, rational choices. Here’s a cool visual guide to cognitive bias that was running around Twitter recently….
If you have data, you probably want to analyze it. Visual Analytics is a hot topic these days – just look at the number of data visualization job posts on the FlowingData site. Honing your visualization skills doesn’t have to be expensive. Middlesex University in London is hosting a Visual Analytics Summer School (Camp) from…
A post commemorating the first 600 days since the kickoff Quantified Self meetup.
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…
This is a pre-announcement of what looks to be a service to connect the iPhone to any fitness and health self-tracking device that uses the ANT+ low power wireless protocol. In lay terms: this means that you should be able to get a bunch of things to talk to your iPhone that couldn’t before, including…
I found the following announcement from Tech-On via a tweet by Scot Kozicki, and found it very entertaining. A company called WIN Human Recorder Co Ltd has launched a new device to collect multiple streams of biometric data. There are all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of this version of the universal biometric collection…
We’ve been asked by fans of QS about organizing QS Show&Tell meetings in their own cities. (Along with the Bay Area QS Show&Tell, there is a thriving New York QS Show&Tell, and new Boston QS Show&Tell just getting going.) Below is a basic FAQ about organizing a meeting of your own. While much of it…
As we get ready for another big Bay Area QS Show&Tell, I thought I would post some tips for people planning to present. Feel free to add other tips in the comments. These meetings continue to be really fun and inspiring. Now that we are getting bigger, it is probably best to email if you…
