Quantified Self member Melanie Swan has just published an open access paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health called “Emerging Patient-Driven Health Care Models: An Examination of Health Social Networks, Consumer Personalized Medicine and Quantified Self-Tracking“. She presents a thorough, well-documented analysis of the players and issues in the personalized health…
All hands on deck for the QS Show&Tell tonight – it looks like it will be fun and interesting. DETAILS HERE And thanks to everybody who took the QS survey. I know it wasn’t comfortable for many to take this kind of “forced choice” survey, but hopefully it will be worth it and we will…
Here’s your chance to share your self-measurement expertise for an upcoming book, The Decision Tree. (Look for the invitation link at the end of this post.) Thomas Goetz, deputy editor of Wired Magazine, has started a new blog-to-be-book about predictive medicine and the future of healthcare. It promises to be a topic close to the…
Do you follow the QS blog or the QS MeetUp from outside the Bay Area? You are invited to organize your own QS Show&Tell, to replicate the very simple format or to alter and improve it. The QS Show&Tell is an informal meeting where people involved in various types of self-tracking share their tools, methods,…
Today’s story on self-tracking and self measurement in the Wall Street Journal featured Alexandra Carmichael, the co-founder of Cure Together, a platform for open source health research. (Alexandra is a regular at the QS Show&Tell.) CureTogether is a community site where members can share information about their health. Alexandra has an excellent post on the…
This is a quick post to invite QS readers to contribute to the Quantified Self Wiki. The Wiki address is: http://quantifiedself.wik.is/ You must register but registration is open and you can begin contributing as soon as you create a user name – no need to wait for a confirmation email or any other bureaucracy at…
The second official Quantified Self Show and Tell will take place this Thursday evening, Oct 23. Our first meeting last month exceeded our expectations, both in the number of people who came and the sophistication of the self-tracking projects that were shared and discussed. It was a real blast. Almost 30 folks showed up. So…
The blog for self-trackers, self-surveillance, and self-knowledge also known as The Quantified Self, now has comments turned on. Your hosts are Gary Wolf and myself. We welcome your response and feedback to any posting. You need to click on the red “Actions” button at the end of a post to get to the comment link….
The same ubiquitous traces that make it easier for us to track ourselves make it easier for other people to track us. So we always take an interest in stories of accidental self-exposure. Here, without too much comment, is a link to today’s notable incident. It comes from the world of GPS tracking; specifically, from…
A quick overview of the emerging culture of self-tracking ran in the Washington Post the other day. Called “Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There’s a Web Site to Help You Keep Track.” The subtitle is a gross exaggeration, although in time it will be true. Right now there are a…
Yesterday was a red letter day in the world of self-quantification, as Nathan Yau declared the winner in his summer-long personal data visualization context. The winner is Tim Graham, whose data blog is an entertaining record of personal data that shows how much narrative (courage, hope, risk, disappointment) can be packed into a single graph….
Last Tuesday 23andMe, the genome sequencing service, hosted the first meeting between its customers. Like Navigenics and deCode, 23andMe will sequence half a million “snips” from your own DNA to give you glimpse of your personal genetics. What you get for your $1,000 payment is lots of numbers and strings of letters, and a little…
The art of constant self-awareness and self-experimentation is essential to the habit of self-metrics. Occasionally a trained scientist can take a small signal from their own life and turn it into a falsifiable result. I found the following note of such self-observation on the website for The People’s Pharmacy. This center for patient submitted alternative…
In the annals of self-monitoring tools, here is one that monitors your computer time. It’s a fancy version of time management software. You assign certain tags for various functions and websites — say “surfing” for Digg, Reddit, or Popurls, or “research” for Wikipedia. After you label your activities once, then RescueTime will gather the stats…
How do you feel in different places? The precise correlation of location and emotional arousal is the topic of Christan Nold‘s long running biomapping project. The project used a simple galvanic skin response meter, which gives a reading of how excited you are. A GSR device is simple. Here’s the Lego version. These GSR readings…
Earlier this week I had a chance to drop in on Nathan Eagle‘s presentation at ETech about using the Bluetooth feature on mobile phones to keep track, not only of where people are, but who happens to be nearby. This research is part of the larger Human Dynamics Group at MIT run by Sandy Pentland….
[ ](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/opinion/08aamodt.html?em&ex=1194670800&en=87671c1cea6447e9&ei=5087%0A)Brain training games are fun for every fan of self-optimization. We don’t like to play them, we like to point out how unconvincing the evidence is that they really help your brain. Today in the New York Times, two neuroscientists take aim at brain training. They guess that the effectiveness of puzzles and mazes…
Steven Johnson, author of “The Ghost Map” and “Everything Bad is Good for You”, is the best textual naturalist I know. He has a remarkable talent for parsing literary forms in a fresh way. He was the first person to bring to my attention the sophisicated literary structure holding together modern TV serial dramas such…
This [interesting blog](http://brainmagnets.blogspot.com/) by Dr. Topher Stephenson tracks the use of “neuromodulation” techniques, including electrical and magnetic stimulation of specific brain regions to produce desired changes in mood and behavior. This seemingly far-out technology is a major topic of applied research today, with new discoveries coming almost too fast to track. In [this post ](http://brainmagnets.blogspot.com/2007/09/9v-battery-for-depression.html),…
To be honest, while I am a huge fan of William Gibson, I don’t read much of him. Don’t read much fiction in general. But every conversation I have had with Gibson, and every time I have heard him speak, or read an interview with him, I have come away amazed and giddy. He’s among…
