A week ago the NY Quantified Self group convened on the 4th floor of NYU’s ITP program where over the summer I was pleased to be a part of their new ITP Summer Camp program where a bunch of us got to perform, compute, craft, process and visualize all sorts of digital stuff. It was a kind of “mash-up of artist residency and summer camp for adults” where lots of QS ideas were forming everywhere.

We started the evening with a social hour complete with munchies and wine provided by our first annual sponsor HealthTap. We also had US correspondent from German National TV & Radio, Beatrice Uerlings, interviewing a bunch of us self-trackers for derStandard. The article is here in German.

Our first talk was from one of our most enthusiastic QS advocates, Esther Dyson who started us off with a beautiful and inspiring story about statistics, options, decision trees and numbers as a guide to one’s health prospects. You’ll want to see the video but until they’re posted, you can read Esther’s article, Life by the Numbers, on HealthTap’s blog.

Next up was Brennan Moore who presented a system he developed with Max Van Kleek while at MIT called Poyozo. t’s a free, open source tool that runs in Firefox and it aggregates much of your personal web-based data to create a more complete picture of your life through interfaces and visualizations. 

Bethany Soule returned to QS to present with her colleague Daniel Reeves their head-to-head challenge and bet of $2,000 that they could meet all kinds of goals over several months including weight, parenting, work and doing pushups. They almost lost.

Academic researcher Regina gave a talk on the use of biofeedback techniques among teenagers in a classroom setting to improve cognition. And Mark presented his research findings on the physics of pathogenic zones or the artificial electromagnetic fields that may be dangerous to human health.

Paul Marcum showed us his latest project FatDrop.pr that integrates our favorite body weight scale, Withings with “weigh-in” tweets from Twitter to generate a global weight loss game. Since ITP alum and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley was in the audience, Paul pulled up his profile to share with the group his current status. A new form of public weigh-ins at QS Show&Tells?

Our last presenter was DJ Edgerton from Zemoga who shared with the group a 5-minute video that outlines a concept his team is working on that provides a way for doctors, family members and caregivers to stay connected and up-to-date on a patient’s health status and progress. It’s called Follow Me and you can check it out here.

We’re working on the videos and we will let you know once they’re posted on Vimeo.

In the fall we’re planning a joint QS Show&Tell with the NY chapter of IxDA on self-tracking and interaction design. We’re looking for talks by self-trackers who are using interaction design to track, visualize and learn from what it all means. We’ll announce the date soon on Meetup.