Victoria Schwanda Sosik is a PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University. She designs and evaluates technologies that support people towards goals of mental and physical wellbeing. She works with Dan Cosley in the Reimagination Lab. Personal Informatics systems often deal in domains and utilize data that are just that: personal. These systems…
In this talk, Beau Gunderson shares a way to bring all of your disparate data sets, from Facebook to Twitter to Foursquare to Zeo to Fitbit to Runkeeper, together in one collection to be accessed through simple APIs. It’s part of an open source development effort called The Locker Project. The hope is to be able to…
Denisa Kera is a professor, philosopher and designer interested in DNA and food data. She asks, what happens when people share data in social situations? She organizes DNA Dinners at a local hackerspace to experiment with this question. In the video below, Denisa talks about how she turned her genetic data into a bruschetta dish,…
Today’s NFATW post comes from Martin Sona, a QS friend and organizer for the QS Aachen/Maastricht meetup group, who pointed out this fascinating project on the QS Facebook group. Dale Lane is a software developer for IBM living and working in Hampshire and he has been developing neat personal tools for his self tracking for the…
We’re excited to announce another new batch of talks and 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: Show&Tell Talks Accounting for Taste: Creating a Highly Reliable Palate (Toli…
Frank Bentley is a Principal Staff Research Scientist at the Motorola Mobility Applied Research Center outside of Chicago, IL. He creates new mobile applications and services that help people connect with each other and with data about their lives. He then studies how these systems are integrated into daily life over weeks and months. Do you…
James Stout is a professional cyclist. He also has Type 1 Diabetes. In this Show & Tell, James explains how self-tracking has empowered him to understand himself and be a role model for others. Truly inspiring. (Filmed by the San Diego QS Show&Tell meetup group.) QS San Diego: James Stout – Diabetes, Exercise, and Quantified Self from Ernesto…
Chloe Fan has kept all of her movie ticket stubs since 2001. Inspired by a minimalism streak, she digitized them all and created some cool visualizations. She learned her movie-watching patterns: by day of week, time of day, IMDB movie rating, price, location, who she was with, etc. In the video below, Chloe walks through…
Richard Ryan was inspired by the first QS conference to spend a year hacking his life. He most wanted to solve his problems with insomnia, obesity, Ambien dependence, hypertension, and drinking alcohol – what he calls “classic New Yorker problems.” In the video below, Richard talks about the changes he made to his lifestyle, rules…
Jakob Larsen and his team at the Mobile Informatics Lab at the Technical University of Denmark have developed a way to build a real-time 3-D model of your brain using a smartphone and the Emotiv EPOC game controller headset. In the Ignite talk below, Jakob describes how the fourteen sensors in this mobile EEG device rival…
I’d like to present to everyone in the QS community the results from my research. I’ve spent almost a whole year now, conducting research for a masters degree in applied anthropology at San Jose State University. For the last six months or so, my research has focused on the QS meetup groups. In my MA…
There are ever more widgets to measure our physical selves, but how can we measure how well we’re thinking? Yoni Donner is trying to address this need with Quantified Mind. At a recent Bay Area QS meetup he told us how he used his tool to discover that fasting reduced his mental acuity, which was…
Bernd Ploderer is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research interest lies in the potential of social media to support engagement, learning and behavior change. He works with Wally Smith, Steve Howard, Jon Pearce, and Ron Borland to design an interpersonal informatics system to help people quit smoking. In this…
Simon Frid moved to California last year because his data told him he was smarter here than in New York. Well, not really. But this funny story begins his journey of figuring out how to track one of the simplest things that we don’t generally know about ourselves: our own posture. Simon designed a wearable…
Nicholas Manolakos is a programmer and avid reader who has been self-tracking for twenty years. He’s recently been improving his left-right body balance, and can write proficiently with both hands now. In the video below, he talks about many of his experiments, including optimizing cognitive performance, managing anxiety, introducing complexity, dietary experiments and fasting –…
We’re excited to announce another new batch of talks and sessions at the upcoming QS conference. Thanks to everyone who is stepping up to speak! Check out these awesome topics: Show&Tell Talks Genes and Other Strangers (Esther Dyson) Tracking Breathing with Wearables (Danielle Roberts) Chronicling chronic lower back pain, posture, and happiness (Andrew Chang) The Quantified…
A New York lawyer named Greg reports remarkably clear evidence about the effect of butter on blood lipid levels: It improved them. For a few years he measured his HDL and LDL regularly with a home cholesterol device. For unrelated reasons, he started eating more butter. He ate a half stick (about 60 g)/day, like me. Here’s…
One day you decide to lead a data-driven life and naturally data collection seeps into the realm of health. Maybe you buy a Zeo to better understand your sleep patterns. Or maybe you decide to start tracking your blood pressure with one of the various new connected tools. Heck, maybe you’re just tracking your daily…
Ryan Muller is a PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He researches principles for designing technology that stimulates our intrinsic drive for mastery-based learning. Although the internet has fundamentally changed the speed and the scale of accessing information, that change has not seen such an impact in traditional forms of education….
Dr. Mark Drangsholt is a long-time self-tracker who also teaches evidence-based medicine at the University of Washington. He has tracked blood pressure and exercise, atrial fibrillation and what triggers it, deep sleep and sex, diet and body fat. In the video below, Mark shares what he learned about his arrhythmia triggers, and how his self-tracking data…
