Blog

Brooks Kincaid: A Diabetic Experiment with Self-Quantification

December 11, 2012

Brooks Kincaid has been tracking his blood glucose continuously for the past two years, after 16 years of finger pricking and guessing. In this video, Brooks openly shares what he has learned about the benefits and challenges of continuous blood glucose monitoring and explains his preferred data view, the modal day snapshot.

Get Your Mood On: Part 1

December 9, 2012

If you’re curious about mood tracking, you’re in for a treat. Robin Barooah and I have written a book compiling our knowledge and experiences of mood tracking, and we’ll be posting chapters of the book here for your enjoyment and feedback. Without further ado, here is the introduction! — Alex’s story: I can honestly say…

QS Worldwide

December 7, 2012

A big part of what we do here at Quantified Self is support and promote our amazing meetup groups around the world. We have a wonderful network of meetups  in over 70 cities in more than 15 countries around the world. We wouldn’t be able to post all the great videos and articles here on…

New York QS Show and Tell #18 Recap

December 6, 2012

We had a great turnout at our last meetup in New York hosted at startup accelerator program Blueprint Health in Soho. Thank you to my co-organizers, Patrick Whitaker and Andrew Paulus , who helped pull together this recap. And thank you to the rest of my co-organizers Brian Gallegos, Mark Brooks and Konstantin Augemberg for…

Buster Benson: Why I Track

December 5, 2012

Twelve years ago, Buster Benson started tracking how different web links affected his mood (the Morale-O-Meter!), and he was surprised to find that other people were interested in his data. In this inspiring video, Buster shares some snapshots of what he has tracked over the past several years, including his famous 8:36 pm project and how…

Stuart Calimport on The Memome Project

November 30, 2012

Stuart Calimport is on a quest to find the most useful memes for health and well-being. He started the Human Memome Project, and spent a year and a half collecting all his ideas about health. He classified 5137 of these ideas as healthy/ethical/optimal and 6581 of them as unhealth/unethical/sub-optimal. In the video below, Stuart shares some…

Gary Wolf: Meditation Q&A

November 28, 2012

At a recent QS meetup in Boston, Gary shares a few quick insights on the challenges of restarting a tracking practice once you’ve stopped, gamification vs. motivation, and his experience of meditation. Check out the video below, as well as a more detailed discussion about his meditation practice. Gary Wolf – Boston QS Q&A –…

Ryan Hagen on Tracking Mental Health with a Smartphone

November 27, 2012

Ryan Hagen is a doctoral student in clinical psychology who’s terrified of people getting therapy through Siri. That said, for his PhD project he was inspired to extend the work of Sandy Pentland and ginger.io correlating people’s passive smartphone behavior data with anxiety and depression. In the video below, Ryan explains his current three-month study, which you can…

QS PDX Recap (October 30, 2012)

November 21, 2012

This guest post comes to us from one of our wonderful QS Meetup organizers, Steven Jonas. If you’re a Meetup Organizer and want to post a recap of your meetup just let us know! Quantified Self Portland Show & Tell Meetup Recap – October 30, 2012 Puppet Labs opened up their space and generously hosted…

Carl Valle on Three Key Metrics for Immortality

November 19, 2012

Carl Valle, track and field coach to elite athletes, believes that the three categories of things to measure for optimal health are activity, biochemistry, and cardiology. In the video below, he walks through his favorite tips for each of these. (Filmed by the Boston QS Show&Tell meetup group.) Carl Valle – Immortality: 3 Key Metrics from James…

Ryota Kanai on Quantifying his Brain

November 18, 2012

Ryota Kanai does brain scans for a living. He can assess a person’s intelligence level, personality traits, and social proclivity from these scans. He even did a study correlating number of friends on Facebook with brain structure. In the video below, Ryota shows a 3-D scan of his brain, highlighted with colors to show where he…

Cristian Monterroza: My Autobiography Through Quantification

November 17, 2012

Cristian Monterroza felt like his life was slipping in a direction that he didn’t like, and was inspired to start tracking by the amazing lifelogging project of artist On Kawara. Cristian started out using several different apps, then created his own app to passively record his daily activities, called wrkstrm. In the video below, Cristian shares the insights…

Catherine Kerr on Cortical Measures in Mindfulness Meditation

November 13, 2012

Catherine Kerr does brain science related to mindfulness at Brown University Medical School. She points out that mindfulness traditions ask practitioners to simply focus closely on body sensations in order to bring attention to the present moment. Why does this help with depression? In the video below, Catherine explains some of her magnetoencephalopathy (MEG) research to…

Matt Dobson on Quantifying Emotions

November 12, 2012

Matt Dobson is working on automatic affect recognition, which basically means quantifying emotions beyond self-reporting. In the video below, Matt walks through the current technologies available to passively detect emotions, helpfully explaining things like galvanic skin response, heart rate variability, and speech tone. He also gives some hints as to where the future of emotion tracking…

Sharla Sava on Shooting Herself: 365 Days of Self-Portraits

November 8, 2012

Sharla Sava decided to take a daily picture of herself for a year, without missing a day. She was inspired by this Flickr self-portrait group. While it was a surprisingly grueling commitment, Sharla learned that self-portraits can be an outlet for public dialog, a powerful mirror, and a creative way to explore the expression of different states…

London Meetup #13

November 5, 2012

The QS London meeting in October (#13) was full of interesting speakers and they’re now available in video form. You can find them all on the London Channel at: London QS Channel The October talks include (in the order presented): Conference Roundup (Adriana Lukas). An Overview for Londoners of the QS Annual Conference. SnoreLab (Jules Goldberg)….

Steven Jonas: Stress Out Loud

November 4, 2012

Steven Jonas discovered through an EEG assessment that he had a strong “freeze” response to stressful situations. This inspired him to use his emWave to monitor his stress levels, hack it to alert him whenever he got too stressed, and change his patterns at work. Check out Steven’s open, inspiring story in the video below, filmed at Quantified…

Toolmaker Talks: Bastian Greshake (openSNP)

October 30, 2012

We talk about very frequently here on the QS website about tools, methods, and systems that help us understand ourselves. When it comes to the self there may be nothing more fundamental to understanding our objective ourness than our basic genetic makeup. Many of you have probably undergone or have thought of using Direct-To-Consumer genetic…