Erica Tanamachi

March 1, 2016

From the Quantified Self Public Health Symposium

Why can’t everybody use advanced analytics to understand themselves? Bob Evans is the lead developer of PACO, an open source tool for supporting both individual discovery and large scale participatory research. Bob originally designed PACO as a personal project to get a better handle on how he felt at work by querying himself at random times during the day, a method known as “experience sampling.” PACO has grown and developed over time into a platform for experimentation used in over one thousand projects designed by researchers, companies, and individuals. Here, Bob shares some of his lessons about how and where the individual quest for self-discovery connects with large scale research. “The goal is to make it easier for researchers and individuals to experience their own lives, be scientists, and make their own experiments at will. The long tail of questions that people want to ask is very, very long.”

Watch Bob’s video on Medium.