In the nearly 10 years since direct-to-consumer genetic testing was pioneered by 23andme, regulators have grown more watchful over the claims companies can make about the benefits of knowing your genome. In response, direct-to-consumer testing companies have changed their game plan, emphasizing ancestry and fun facts over physiological insight. Meanwhile, at Quantified Self meetings and…
As the summer ends in the northern hemisphere, the number of QS meetups is picking up and there are some great groups getting together this week. Amsterdam will have a combined meetup with Behavior Design AMS. They will have toolmaker talks from Kenkodo (tracking metabolism) and Fithacking.nl (fitness), as well as, a researcher talk from Marleen…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Aug 22, 2015
I first got a look at the Oura ring at the Quantified Self Public Health Symposium last May. I was surprised that the Oura engineers had managed to get sleep and activity tracking into a bit of jewelry the size of a ring, and ever since I’ve been deeply curious to experiment for myself. Although…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Aug 8, 2015
Mark Wilson will be presenting his project at the QS15 Conference and Exposition. I wonder if we could get Tehching Hsei to present his?
We’ve featured the work of our friend and QS community member, Doug Kanter, many times here on the Quantified Self website and we were excited to have him participate in our Quantified Self Public Health Symposium. Doug is both a toolmaker and self-tracker, focusing primarily on using his experience with tracking his diabetes-related data to…
When we decide to track one thing, we sometimes find that we are indirectly tracking something else. That is the theme of today’s talk. When Mark Leavitt was 57, he found out that he had heart disease, a condition that runs in his family. Mark set about making some life changes. He tracked his weight…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Oct 19, 2013
Stan James finds comfort in his daily habits.So much so, that he found that he kept adding to his routine. He started out by just using physical reminders, but found that tracking tools like Equinimity (meditation) and 750 Words (writing) added a little extra boost. In August of 2012 he started using Lift, a habit…
This Thursday we kick off our fifth Quantified Self Conference. We’ve come a long way since our first conference in 2011 and we can’t wait to open the doors and welcome everyone to a wonderful event. We’ll be hosting over 400 self-trackers, toolmakers, researchers, and other members of our growing QS community. We’ve planned…
When you move from a small town to a big city you’re faced with a number of interesting challenges. How do you get around? Should you sell your car? When Valerie Aurora moved to San Francisco she faced these common roadblocks, but she also encountered something new: being harassed. In this great talk, filmed at…
In this wonderful talk from the Bay Area Quantified Self Show&Tell meeting, Ashish Mukharji, author of Run Barefoot, Run Healthy, describes doing three years of continuous happiness tracking, using a single number.
This slide from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends slide deck (link is to full deck on Slideshare) puts some numbers around what we’ve been noticing among QS Toolmakers: everybody wants to talk APIs.
What would you do if you had access to accurate galvanic skin response (GSR), skin temperature, heat flux, and 3-axis accelerometer data, as well as processed data estimating calorie burn, physical activity levels, steps, and sleep? We are holding a contest over in our QS Forum to provoke good questions that can be answered with…
We want to better serve our community. To that end, we’ve created a short survey to to help us understand how we can use this website to support you and your Quantified Self endeavors. We have some ideas about where this website can go, but we want to hear from our community! Please take a…
Debjanee Barua is PhD student of Computer Science in University of Sydney. She works in CHAI research group. She designs and develops software framework and user interfaces for Personal Informatics. Judy Kay is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. Her research is in technologies for human computer interaction, supporting personalisation, pervasive and…
This special guest post in our ongoing QS 101 series comes to us from Dan Gartenberg, our great QS-Washington DC meetup organizer, and his fellow graduate students in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition program at George Mason University. Turning Scientific Concerns into Strengths for Quantified Self Experimentation By Dan Gartenberg, Ewart de Visser, and…
While other European countries have had Quantified Self meetups for a while till now we unfortunately had no Meetups in Germany. This has got to change. Therefore we’ll do something about it. Our first German meetup is going to be held in Berlin on the 17th of December in the c-base. The meetup groups for Munich and…
Niels Schrader and Bert Kommerij presented their data tracking via a smartphone. They tracked their SMS’s over time and distance, ran some simple analytics like how many smiley’s were used in messages. It’s passive tracking with what people are doing with their smart phones now, with analytics. In the future, this is the kind of…
