It’s been an honor to have Beeminder founders Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule participating in Quantified Self meetings, giving us a chance to watch the evolution of their very useful tool for setting and achieving personal goals. These days they are working on the forefront of device and service integration. In this talk Daniel gives…
In response to the much anticipated reveal of the Apple Watch I did a bit of digging around to find out where we stand with wrist-worn wearable devices. I found over 60 different devices. The following list focuses on self-tracking tools, I intentionally left out those that work only as notification centers or secondary displays…
Scanadu, a sponsor of Quantified Self, announces their recently launched Indiegogo campaign for Scanadu Scout: a medical grade Tricorder that emulates an Emergency Room in your pocket.
If you’re a loyal, or even infrequent user of the Zeo sleep tracking device then you’ve probably heard the sad news that the company has shut down. This opens up a lot of questions about what is means to make consumer devices in this day and age, but rather than focus on those issues we’ld…
A quick post here to highlight some interesting developments in the heart rate tracking space. Tracking and understanding heart rate has been a cornerstone of self-tracking since, well since someone put two fingers on their neck and decided to write down how many pulses they felt. We’ve come a long way from that point. If…
Here at QS Labs we’ve been curious about the differences between two of the most popular devices among self-trackers: The Nike+ FuelBand and the FitBit. I’m the latest experimenter on this topic, and since January I’ve been wearing a FuelBand on my left wrist and a FitBit (original model) in the right hand coin pocket…
A month ago we showed you what we thought was the quintessential example of how Quantified Self is becoming more of a mainstream activity. During a trip to the Apple store we identified over 20 different Quantified Self devices. Another outing led me into one of the largest consumer electronics stores in the US: Best Buy. Here,…
We are not the only ones curious about whether our activity level looks different when seen with different trackers. Bastian Greshake, co-founder of OpenSNP.org, has been comparing his FuelBand and his Fitbit for months. Here’s what he found.
Gary and I were inspired to start looking into activity tracker data by James Wolcott’s comment in his recent Vanity Fair Story: According to Fitbit, I took 7,116 steps on November 27; Jawbone has me at 2,192, a bit of a discrepancy. I prefer to believe Fitbit’s higher tally is the correct one, because that is the…
Last week we brought you a look into some of the interesting Quantified Self tools that were debuted at CES. Here are a few more we noticed from the deluge of CES coverage. Thanks to MobiHealthNews, Gizmodo, Engadget and many QS friends for the tips. Withings Smart Body Analyzer (WS-50) The latest wireless scale from…
I’ve been curious about tracking physical activity since I was an undergraduate. I remember traveling to a local middle school with a researcher interested in how physical activity was taught in low-income Native American communities. Back then, the best we could do was have the children wear simple electromechanical pedometers to count their steps during…
To start a sparkling new year, I thought it would be fun and helpful to make a fresh list of all the QS-related tools, companies and projects out there. I found 205, and I’m sure there are more, so please feel free to add your tool or ones that you know about to the comments….
One of the most common questions I get from people is, “do you have a list of all Quantified Self tools, or resources in a particular area, like heart rate variability or cognitive function?” We’ve been cobbling together a preliminary list of self-tracking resources over the past few months, but we are now very excited to…
I’m starting to wonder – is there any aspect of life that cannot be tracked? This week’s roundup on lifestyle-tracking tools moves into deeply personal areas like sex life, baby’s sleep schedule, amount of drinking, menstrual cycles, meditation, and media consumption. Proceed with caution if you are squeamish. It’s part of our regular tool roundup for the…
In advance of our next Bay Area Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup, which will have a Health and Medicine theme, this roundup post is on health- and medicine-related self-tracking tools. Blood pressure, genetics, medical test results, blood sugar readings, hormone levels, dietary experiments – if you have a self-tracking project, gadget, or app, we want to…
Lifelogging – the continuous capture of a large part of one’s life. Some people use paper journals, others sport wearable cameras, post status updates, or tap numbers into their smart phones. If you record your life or make tools to record lives, read on! This post is part of our regular tool roundup for the…
In this review, I will discuss electricity monitors. Instead of describing the devices one-by-one, I looked at the features of a bunch of these devices using the considerations I wrote about in this article and grouped them into two groups: real-time and long-term. Electricity monitors that belong to the real-time group show users their electricity…
In this review, I will take the considerations that I wrote about in my last article to analyze some self-tracking tools. The considerations are: 1) What questions are the tool answering? 2) How is the data collected? and 3) How do you reflect on the data? I’m also adding a fourth consideration, data portability, as…
This is the second article of a series where I review several self-tracking tools. I will go on a little tangent this week. To make it clear what I look for in different tools, I will discuss the different aspects of self-tracking tools to consider when making a selection. These considerations are based on my…
This is our first roundup topic by request! Michael Nagle, organizer of the Boston QS Show&Tell meetup, wrote to say that the founder of StickK is coming to speak at their next meetup. He asked if we could do a roundup of goal-tracking tools in advance of that, so here it is. Thanks Nagle! It’s part…
