Despite the fact that our human existence relies on pregnant women and birth, there is surprisingly very little understood when a woman doesn’t fall within the “averages” and the “knowns.” We are all so different, and any woman knows that her body at some point will most likely not fall within the “average” range and…
Sharing Ellis Bartholomeus, again–not only because she’s awesome–but, the project she presented at 2015 QS Europe Conference in Amsterdam, Draw a Face a Day relates to a recent post on Tracking Happiness. Like Ashish’s project, Ellis tracks her mood with 1 simple task at the end of the day–but, instead of using a number (at least…
Another conceptually simple idea, but still just as profound, comes from a project by Ashish Mukharji called Tracking Happiness, presented at a Bay Area Meetup in 2013. It’s another great example of the timelessness of QS projects. QS’ers are constantly asking ageless questions where the answers are often in flux as our bodies and minds…
Dan Armstrong kept a gratitude list for two years and shared his project Learning from Gratitude at a New York Meetup in 2015. Armstrong is a writer and in this talk, he shares how keeping a gratitude list every day for the past two year has changed his habits, actions and outlook. Every morning Armstrong…
Ellis Bartholemeus is a big fan of quantifying and at QS17 she presented her project My Health Scars that shares her “quantified body” from tracking and measuring her physical scars. Scars represent memories from the past that are often derived from traumatic events. However, there can be deep learnings lived through each “representative” scar and…
Steven Jonas presented his interesting project, Spaced Listening to the Bay Area Meetup Group at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley in 2017. In this project, Steven takes a very active role in his music engagement to increase his listening palate. Steven knows that he needs to listen to an album a few times…
To beat potential Summer boredom, hopefully this next highlighted project from Bill Schuller will give some inspiration. Bill Schuller presented QS Adventures with my Kids at the 2013 QS Global Conference in the Presidio, San Francisco. Bill started tracking his exercise and weight in 2010. His preschool-aged son, began to imitate Bill’s tracking behavior by regularly stepping…
Aligned with QS and learning, Victor Lee presents Quantifying with Kids at QS15 in San Francisco. As an educator, Lee spends most of his time thinking about how learning works. Lee discusses his QS project using a range of technologies (fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin) to track kids’ activities throughout their days. Lee helps the students work with their…
We’re thrilled to share the news that, along with our normal wide range of show&tell talks, breakout discussions, and toolmaker demos, this year’s QS conference is going to have a special focus on self-collected data in formal and informal learning. Over the coming months we’ll be developing the program in close collaboration with a wide range of self-trackers and toolmakers. If you’re a student, an educator, or both, we’re especially eager to find out what you’ve been working on.
Join us today (April 19th), starting at 9am for a special all-day event about the intersection between Quantified Self and public health. The sessions will look specifically at cardiovascular health and participant-led research. You can view the entire program here. QS CVD Symposium Live Feed
The Quantified Self Public Health Symposium addresses the role of self-collected data in advancing health. This years meeting at the University of California, San Diego brings together invited researchers and advocates from diverse fields, including clinicians, policymakers, technologists, scholars and community members to share progress reports and initiate new collaborations. This year’s focus is on…
Here’s an interesting call for papers for citizen scientists by the journal Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The editors want first person accounts of ethical issues in citizen science. I’ve been part of many discussions of whether QS is part of citizen science. There are some key differences. The most important…
Environmental disturbances and modern lifestyles can cause people to become out of sync between external time and their body’s internal clock. These disruption of the circadian rhythm can lead to an increase in obesity, diabetes and other life threatening metabolic disease. This review by Hans Reinke and Gad Asher provides an overview on the circadian role in metabolism.
A review of Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth — A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the Dozen,” a biography of one of the greatest early biometricians written by Jane Lancaster.
On November 17th, the Bay Area and SF Meetup groups hosted QS Show&Tell talks at WeWork Mid-Market. Thank you to everybody who came and presented. We saw some brilliant talks, including one about tracking during pregnancy with data challenging common, supposedly scientific pregnancy advice, and a talk outlining a fascinating self-study of bruxism (teeth grinding)…
We recently announced that we’re collaborating several other editors to edit a special “focus theme” on N-of-1 experiments for the established informatics journal, Methods of Information in Medicine. N-of-1 Call For Papers (PDF) Here’s an extract from our justification for the call: Scientific progress in medicine and public health during the last century has been…
In this final talk from the QS Public Health Symposium, we asked two leading advocates for a culture of health to help set an agenda for our movement over the next year. Bryan Sivak is the former CTO of the US Department of Health and Human Services, and Lori Melichar is a director at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Nate Heintzman is a member of the research and development team at Dexcom, makers of the leading continuous glucose monitor for people with diabetes. In this talk, Nate explains why Dexcom has decided to treat its lead users as collaborators, even when their ingenuity, advocacy and inspiring impatience leads them to step beyond regulatory and business frontiers.
Joyce Lee is a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Michigan and a leader in developing methods of collaborative clinical research with patient communities. In this talk from QSPH15, Joyce describes why patients are leading the way in developing new kinds of science, experimentation, and models of communicating knowledge based on her experience working with CGM in the Cloud, an online group supporting the DIY data project Nightscout.
Howard Look is the founder and CEO of Tidepool.org, a non-profit open source effort to build better software for diabetes. He became a leading advocate for access after his daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and discovering how crucial data was being locked away in devices for managing the condition. In this talk from QSPH15, Howard describes the role of Tidepool and the larger challenge of opening up diabetes data.
