Blog

Personal Informatics in Practice: Enabling People to Capture, Manage and Control Information for Lifelong Goals

May 22, 2012

Debjanee Barua is PhD student of Computer Science in University of Sydney. She works in CHAI research group. She designs and develops software framework and user interfaces for Personal Informatics. Judy Kay is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. Her research is in technologies for human computer interaction, supporting personalisation, pervasive and…

Personal Informatics in Practice: Deep Personalization

May 15, 2012

Bon Adriel Aseniero is currently a computer science undergraduate researcher at the University of Calgary under the supervision of Dr. Sheelagh Carpendale and Dr. Anthony Tang. He has an interest in Art and Aesthetic Design, while his research is mainly in Personal Informatics and Visual Analytics. I have used some applications in my phone that…

New York QS Show&Tell #16 Recap

May 14, 2012

Last week we had over a 100 folks attend our 16th NY Show&Tell with a Demo Hour held on Tuesday, May 8th at an incredible space that was generously provided by Digitas, a digital brand agency that has watched and supported QS closely over the years. Thank you to my co-organizers, Ben Ahrens and Brian…

Beijing Quantified Self?

May 11, 2012

I recently had lunch with Richard Sprague, an engineer at Microsoft Beijing. He raised the possibility of starting a Quantified Self Meetup group in Beijing. The meetings could be held in one of Microsoft’s two brand new buildings, which are in the exact center of Zhongguancun. If you might attend, please let me know (e.g.,…

Numbers From Around the Web: Round 7

May 10, 2012

Where are you? A pretty easy question to answer. But, what about, “Where was I?” Not so easy to answer, especially when we start talking about periods of time more than a few days or weeks. Sure, we all have GPS running on our phones now. We can check in with Foursquare/Facebook/Path etc. to keep…

Toolmaker Talk: Michael Forrest (Happiness)

May 9, 2012

In talking with many toolmakers, I find myself constantly surprised by how different people approach the same, and seemingly simple, issue with very different perspectives. A few months ago I wrote about Mood Panda which went from private to community. In contrast, Michael Forrest’s Happiness has evolved from shared to private. I also find Michael’s experimentation with the…

Understanding Self-Efficacy and the Design of Personal Informatics Tools

May 8, 2012

Adrienne Andrew is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Washington. She is interested in studying how people use food diaries on mobile phones: what challenges “typically motivated” users have, balance between capturing less detailed yet still valuable food information, and identifying new ways to organize food databases to support a wider…

10 New QS Conference Sessions by Awesome Attendees

May 8, 2012

We’re excited to announce another new batch of sessions at the upcoming QS conference. Thanks to everyone who is stepping up to speak! The full roster of show&tell talks and breakout sessions so far is listed here. Check out these awesome new topics: Breakout Conversations How to separate user feedback signal from noise and incorporate into product…

Adding Smart Gestures to Everyday Objects and the Human Body

May 6, 2012

Imagine if you could switch your music track while running just by tapping on your hand or your arm. What if your TV and lights knew when you had fallen asleep and automatically turned off. Or if doorknobs were as smart as your current tablet touchscreen and you could send messages to people before they…

Sarah Lewington and Michelle Hughes on Empathic Design

May 5, 2012

Sarah Lewington and Michelle Hughes study and teach fashion communication at Nottingham Trent University. In the 5-minute Ignite talk below, they talk about designing with empathy for a project they’re doing with Unilever, with more questions than answers, such as: what is the relative importance of data and functionality vs. emotional attachment to a device?…

Effect of Vitamin D3 on My Sleep

May 4, 2012

I have blogged many times about biohacker Tara Grant’s discovery that she slept much better if she took Vitamin D3 in the morning rather than later. Many people reported similar experiences, with a few exceptions. Lots of professional research has studied Vitamin D3 but the researchers appear to have no idea of this effect. They don’t control the time of day…

QS 101: The Science of Self Experimentation

May 3, 2012

This special guest post in our ongoing QS 101 series comes to us from Dan Gartenberg, our great QS-Washington DC meetup organizer, and his fellow graduate students in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition program at George Mason University. Turning Scientific Concerns into Strengths for Quantified Self Experimentation By Dan Gartenberg, Ewart de Visser, and…

Welcome Robert Lynde!

May 2, 2012

Running Quantified Self Labs, the organization that supports and coordinates fun QS events and communities around the world, takes funding. We’re very grateful to have generous sponsors that believe in the movement we’re nurturing and want to help make it blossom. And now we’re excited to announce that Robert Lynde is joining Gary, Ernesto, and…

Spark: Visualizing Physical Activity Using Abstract Ambient Art

May 1, 2012

Chloe Fan has been self-tracking since she was 14 years old and saw the first Harry Potter movie in theaters. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute. After finding her passion for data visualization and information design for self-tracking tools, she has decided to take a year off grad school…

May QS Newsletter

April 30, 2012

As we wrap up a wonderful April we here at QS Labs wanted to create something to let you all know what’s going with Quantified Self. Thanks to some prompting from our wonderful worldwide meetup organizers we decided to create the QS Newsletter.             Inside you’ll find a variety of…

Hugo Campos on Going Vegan in December

April 28, 2012

Hugo Campos lives with arrhythmia, and is a self-professed data nudist. He decided to do an experiment last December to improve his health and his heart – going vegan and taking beautiful pictures of every single meal he ate to post to a public Flickr set. In the video below, Hugo gives an animated talk about…

Gareth MacLeod on Holistic Tracking and Correlations

April 27, 2012

Gareth MacLeod is a developer/entrepreneur interested in making QS techniques easy to incorporate into daily life. He built an app that sends him text messages to ask about his sleep, mood, romantic encounters, tooth brushing, etc. He then looks for correlations among the different data streams, and even spent 100 hours building a correlation heat…

Numbers From Around the Web: Round 6

April 26, 2012

There is something really magical about taking data and turning it into a compelling visual image. Even though I’ve already written a bit about the importance of making data visual, I am consistently amazed at how data can be made more appealing and informative by creating eye-popping graphics. Today we are devoting this NFATW post…