We were fascinated by the conversation started Monday by the release of the Pew survey about self-tracking by Susannah Fox. As with any survey research, the top line results provoked the most discussion, and also some intelligent skepticism. We’ve had a few days to digest the results, and here’s our analysis of the two key questions.
If you’ve been reading our posts for a while you’ve most likely noticed that we typically reference the Quantified Self community. If you’re not familiar with our structure and how to get involved you might be asking yourself, “How do I get involved with the QS community?”
Today the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released their latest findings in their ongoing research on the role of the Internet and technology in health and wellness. This latest report, Tracking for Health, is of particular interest to the Quantified Self community because it focuses on self-tracking. Thanks to Pew Associate Director,…
Welcome to part 4 of the QS book on mood tracking that Robin Barooah and I wrote. This chapter has some tips that we’ve found helpful for getting started with mood tracking. Enjoy! — The excitement of starting a tracking project can lead to a classic newbie behavior of tracking too many things at once. This can…
We are not the only ones curious about whether our activity level looks different when seen with different trackers. Bastian Greshake, co-founder of OpenSNP.org, has been comparing his FuelBand and his Fitbit for months. Here’s what he found.
Gary and I were inspired to start looking into activity tracker data by James Wolcott’s comment in his recent Vanity Fair Story: According to Fitbit, I took 7,116 steps on November 27; Jawbone has me at 2,192, a bit of a discrepancy. I prefer to believe Fitbit’s higher tally is the correct one, because that is the…
Here is a brief roundup of some of the things we’ve either collected or written about tracking mood since we first started paying attention to mood tracking back in 2008. Get Your Mood On Alex Carmichael and Robin Barooah have recently completed work on an excellent book detailing their experiences and knowledge gained from years of…
This feels very fast. A year ago there were a small number of Quantified Self devices, and a sense of high geekery. I walked into the Apple Store in Santa Monica last Wednesday and this is what I saw. There isn’t much that’s more mainstream than Apple retail at the moment, and I counted twenty-two…
Last week we brought you a look into some of the interesting Quantified Self tools that were debuted at CES. Here are a few more we noticed from the deluge of CES coverage. Thanks to MobiHealthNews, Gizmodo, Engadget and many QS friends for the tips. Withings Smart Body Analyzer (WS-50) The latest wireless scale from…
Adi Andrei wanted to combine artificial intelligence, psychology, art, and storytelling for the purpose of self-discovery of the subconscious mind. In the video below, Adi explains why he’s focused on this, how to go about entering the subconscious, and what he’s learned about hacking it. (Filmed by the London QS Show&Tell meetup group.) Hacking the Unconscious Mind from…
I’ve been curious about tracking physical activity since I was an undergraduate. I remember traveling to a local middle school with a researcher interested in how physical activity was taught in low-income Native American communities. Back then, the best we could do was have the children wear simple electromechanical pedometers to count their steps during…
To start a sparkling new year, I thought it would be fun and helpful to make a fresh list of all the QS-related tools, companies and projects out there. I found 205, and I’m sure there are more, so please feel free to add your tool or ones that you know about to the comments….
Welcome to part 3 of the QS book on mood tracking that Robin Barooah and I wrote. This chapter explains how to prepare for your self-tracking journey. We hope it helps you in your future tracking adventures! — Before you start tracking something new, there’s an important first step you can do to lay the groundwork for…
Amelia Greenhall, of QS Seattle, describes five simple and powerful self-tracking experiments she has been doing over the past few years that feel like getting gold stars. For example, she records everything she has learned, done, read, or accomplished each month. Check out Amelia’s insightful lessons in the video below. Amelia Greenhall: Gold Star from…
J. Paul Neeley has done experiments on optimizing happiness, self-control, and most recently, puns! His mom and brother are great punsters, so he decided to measure how many puns happened over Thanksgiving weekend with his family. In the video below, J. Paul explains this fun experiment, shares what he learned about the pattern of puns, and warns…
Neil Bachelor has been tracking his daily learning for the past two and a half years, with 3,200 discrete learning events. One of his motivations for this is to create a data-based CV that reflects his real work and learning habits. Neil uses Faviki to bookmark things he’s learned. In the video below, he describes his…
Crystal Goh looks at brains every day, as part of her work in a brain and sleep imaging lab in Berkeley. She wanted to know how her brain was different from other brains, in a quantitative way. In the video below, Crystal explains voxel-based morphometry, normalization and standard deviation calculations, and the scary, revealing things…
Welcome to part 2 of the QS book on mood tracking that Robin Barooah and I wrote. This chapter walks through the various ways of measuring mood. Please enjoy, and share anything we’ve missed in the comments! — How Is Mood Measured? When someone asks you how you’re feeling, how do you reply? With a…
Jules Goldberg is a snorer, and estimates that he has spent 1/8th of his life snoring. The noise was bothering his wife, so he built an app called SnoreLab to quantify his snoring (mild, loud, or epic?) and help him reduce it. In the video below, Jules shares how he identified where his snoring was coming…
This post was kindly sent in by Peter Lewis and Florian Schumacher, translated from Arne Tensfeldt’s original post in German. — The first Show & Tell meetup of theBerlin International Quantified Self Group took place on November 22nd. The Berlin QS Group had been founded several weeks earlier for the English-speaking Berlin community. With around 70 participants, the meetup was…
