Blog

iYou Accumulates Smart Phone Data

November 26, 2011

Niels Schrader and Bert Kommerij presented their data tracking via a smartphone. They tracked their SMS’s over time and distance, ran some simple analytics like how many smiley’s were used in messages. It’s passive tracking with what people are doing with their smart phones now, with analytics. In the future, this is the kind of…

Genetics Communities and the Future of Genes

November 26, 2011

I led a very interesting discussion at Quantified Self Europe this morning with about 10 attendees with a variety of backgounds. There were entrepreneurs who wanted to start genetic information based companies, a designer, a think tank analyst, and people who are just interested in where the field is and where it was going. The…

Quantified Self Europe starts!

November 26, 2011

An excited, sold-out crowd is gathered in Amsterdam today for our first Quantified Self Europe conference. You can follow along on Twitter with the hashtags #qs2011 and #qseurope. To give a bit of background for our Dutch readers, here is a video of Martijn Aslander, one of the QS Europe organizers, at a recent talk…

Melanie Swan on Genomic Self-Hacking

November 21, 2011

Melanie Swan of DIY Genomics describes the results of sequencing her own genome in the hopes of developing her own personalized preventive medicine strategies. She developed a mobile app that permits exporting of personalized sequencing data more easily. A series of small nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified by Melanie in her own genome relating to…

Roger Craig Wins Jeopardy Championship with Knowledge Tracking

November 17, 2011

Roger Craig had a dream of being on Jeopardy, and he took a QS approach to making it happen. He downloaded all historical Jeopardy questions and answers into a database, clustering the questions by topic and keyword, and built a web tool around it to quiz himself. He visualized his answers to see where his…

Toolmaker Talk: Gil Blander (InsideTracker)

November 16, 2011

This is the third post in the “Toolmaker Talks” series. The QS blog features many stories by those conducting personal QS projects that are about: what did they do? how did they do it? and what have they learned?  In Toolmaker Talks we hear from those closely observing all this QS activity and developing appropriate…

Wako Takayama: Line-Dried Clothes Smell So Good

November 14, 2011

Wako Takayama loves the smell of line-dried clothes. She also likes that it’s a way to conserve energy. In this video, Wako reflects on methods she developed to increase energy conservation after moving from an apartment to a home. Her personal experiences resulted in her becoming trained as an energy efficiency consultant and volunteering in…

Quantified Self European Conference

November 12, 2011

After our amazing experience together last May at the first Quantified Self conference, some of the attendees who had come all the way from Holland asked for a European conference, so that some of the great contributors to the QS scene could participate more easily. Just six months later, that conference is happening. I’m amazed…

The Carefully Curated Unconference

November 9, 2011

     Quantified Selfers really love to gather face to face, sharing stories and experiments and tips. I’ve even had the humbling experience of people telling me that coming to a QS event changed their life. So how do we put together our events, to encourage this deep, collaborative learning? With our first European QS…

Panel Discussion on Health Incentives

November 7, 2011

Boston QS organizer Michael Nagle gathers a panel of people in the social health space, and asks them: if not all behaviors can be incentivized, who are the users that succeed with your platform, and who are the users that fail? Dr. Joseph Kvedar of the Center for Connected Health, Rick Lee of Healthrageous, Jackie Thong…

Robert Carlsen on Riding Through Mountains of Data

November 4, 2011

Robert Carlsen, a recent graduate of Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, created a really neat little iPhone application called MobileLogger to better understand bicycle commuting behavior in New York City. Like many other activity tracking applications MobileLogger samples and stores data from the phone’s GPS and accelerometer. What makes MobileLogger unique is that the raw…

Toolmaker Talk: Nicholas Gammell (GAIN Fitness)

November 2, 2011

This is the second post in the “Toolmaker Talks” series. The QS blog features many stories by those conducting personal QS projects that are about: what did they do? how did they do it? and what have they learned?  In Toolmaker Talks we hear from those closely observing all this QS activity and developing appropriate tools: what…

Gary Wolf on Listening

October 31, 2011

Gary Wolf shares “What we learned from starting Quantified Self” and starts off sharing a key journalistic secret – listen! He explains the biggest ‘surprise’ to come out of the QS experiment – face to face meetings are a key element in the collaborative knowledge making process. And in order to grow our family, let’s…

Chris Lukic on Smashrun

October 28, 2011

Inspired how powerful a connection he developed to the tracking of his runs, Chris Lukic has built a website to display data from a Nike sensor and put it in a social context.  There are badges to reward users for various achievements, and something akin to a leaderboard for seeing how your runs compare to…

The Importance of Listening

October 26, 2011

This is another post in our Lab Notes series to give you a sneak peek at how we work behind the scenes at Quantified Self Labs. “What’s your vision for Quantified Self?” and “Where will QS be in 10 years?” These are probably the two most common questions reporters ask us. I never know how…

Eri Gentry on Social QS Studies

October 24, 2011

Eri Gentry describes her presentation ‘Social Studies’ as “like Quantified Self, but Quantified Us!” She has always been wiling to be a participant in normal experiments; however, she now realizes that she wants her data to improve herself. Now she uses Genomera.com to run her own experiments that allow the participants to be actively involved…

Marie Dupuch on Mood Tracking

October 21, 2011

-This review was written by Craig Protzel for my class DIY Health at NYU ITP (Tisch School of the Arts). In this class, students design systems of self-care that help people take stock of themselves by exploring ways to measure, reflect and act upon their health and lifestyle.- Marie Dapuch’s “Mood Tracking” is very much focused…