Blog

Cathal Gurrin: Seven Years of Lifelogging

April 27, 2013

Lifelogging is somewhat of a hot topic these days. With the soft release of Google Glass, the crowdfunding success of personal logging cameras like Memoto, and the release of numerous technology-enabled auto diaries it should be no surprise that Lifelogging is a one of the core themes of our upcoming Quantified Self Europe Conference. We’re…

What would you do with a free BodyMedia armband?

April 25, 2013

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…

Self Expression From Performance Data

April 23, 2013

Typically when we think about Quantified Self and the associated collection and visualization of personal data we’re left struggling in the world of charts, graphs, and other well-worn visualizations. That’s not to disparage those of you who love spending some time tinkering in Excel. Those are valuable tools for understanding and there is a good…

Ellis Bartholomeas: This Is What I Ate

April 22, 2013

Food. It’s a wonderful social glue that binds people and cultures together in common practices of preparation, presentation, and consumption. It also happens to be a behavior perfectly positioned for self-tracking. Have I ate too much? Did I get enough vitamins? Am I drinking enough water? Am I drinking too much beer? These introspections can…

Announcing New QS Europe Conference Talks!

April 19, 2013

There are just 22 days left until the QS Europe 2013 Conference in Amsterdam! Here are all of the remaining talks and sessions that we have scheduled so far. Check them out below, and the full program online here and here. Hope to see you there! — New Show&Tells QS Techniques in the Context of CBT and Personal…

Hands Free Heart Rate Tracking

April 17, 2013

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…

Buster Benson Talks Life Logging at 2013 QS Europe Conference

April 16, 2013

We’re excited to share some great news with our Quantified Self community: Buster Benson, one of the most inspring tool makers and self-trackers we know, will be giving a plenary talk about his experiences and adventures in lifelogging at the upcoming Quantified Self European Conference. Buster has long been a friend and an inspiration to…

Konstantin Augemberg on Tracking Happiness

April 15, 2013

How can I lead a happier life? I’m sure this is something we’ve all asked ourselves. Maybe it was during a turn through doldrums or maybe you asked yourself how you could sustain your happiness during a moment of joy. Whatever the case happiness, and by extension mood tracking, has been at the forefront of engaging in…

How To Make A Sparktweet

April 13, 2013

Data visualization theorist and pioneer, Edward Tufte, popularized the use of sparklines, which he describes as “datawords: data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.” Learn to display your own quantitative data to Twitter with a Sparktweet.

Steven Jonas: Tracking My Stress

April 9, 2013

We are only four short weeks away from hosting our second Quantified Self European Conference and our excitement is building as we receive more previews of the talks and presentations we’ll be hosting. As you can probably guess, putting on a conference can be a stressful endeavor. Luckily stress tracking and management has been the…

Help Us Improve QuantifiedSelf.com

April 9, 2013

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…

Announcing New Talks for QS Europe Conference!

April 8, 2013

The QS Europe 2013 Conference in Amsterdam is one month away! Here are some more of the awesome talks and sessions that will be given by QS community members. Check them out below, and please remember to register soon if you’d like to come – there are only a few tickets left. Hope to see you there! — New Show&Tells…

Eric Boyd: Learning from my Nike FuelBand Data

April 5, 2013

We’ve been getting some great Quantified Self Show & Tell talks coming in as we get closer to our European conference. Now that there are so many self-tracking tools that can serve as tools for gaining insight into our actions and behaviors it’s important to understand what we can learn from the data we gather….

Quantified Self as Soft Resistance

April 4, 2013

At the Quantified Self conference last year I attended a breakout session for scholars interested in QS as a research topic. There was an interesting range of fields represented, including medicine, anthropology, sociology, and public health. I’ve appreciated the criticism that the researchers bring. For instance, nearly all of the anthropologists are trained to see technologies…

Amy Robinson on Quantifying Curiosity

April 3, 2013

By being able to see my ideas and see how they’re connected to each other, I’m able to think about myself in new ways. Amy Robinson is curious. That curiosity led her to think very deeply about her curiosity. What was she curious about? Where do her ideas come from? What inspires her? In this…

Dave Marvit on Tracking Stress and PTSD

March 27, 2013

In this short Ignite talk, Dave Marvit from Fujitsu Labs of America talks about a prototype system he is developing to track stress and monitoring stressful events in veterans with PTSD. The Sprout system brings in and syncs multiple data streams allowing researchers, clinicians, and individuals to develop a deeper insight into what’s really happening during…

The New York QS Meetup Survey

March 26, 2013

Today’s post comes to us from Andrew Paulus, a member of the New York QS Meetup group. QS Meetups are a great time to see demos, hear interesting show & tells, and talk to a few people after. With hundreds of members just in the local New York group it is impossible to meet everyone…