With 26 QS groups around the world now, chances are there’s a meetup somewhere near you. Here are some upcoming QS Show&Tells to check out: April 27 – QS Seattle #2 April 28 – QS London #4 April 28 – QS Vermont #1 May 16 – QS Amsterdam #3 May 28-29 – Global QS Conference…
Tim van den Dool takes care of his older parents, and has created a system to help caregivers like himself. His ongoing project is called Livind, for Assisted Daily Living. The system monitors elderly people in a non-invasive way to watch for accidents or other irregular things. If something happens, caregivers are remotely notified trough…
What’s the smallest thing you’ve tracked that had a short turnaround time but generated useful results? I’ve noticed that the kinds things we try here in the Quantified Self community are often longer-term experiments that seem to be a week or two long at a minimum. I think this is primarily due to the effects…
At the Quantified Self Conference, coming up May 28-29 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, we’ll be having a participatory breakout to explore the topic of Personalized Life Extension: what can each one of us do to quantify and optimize those factors that affect our individual health and longevity. We’ll kick off…
Long-time Quantified Self regulars Joe & Lisa Betts-LaCroix co-present their comparison of QS to the better-studied practice of journaling, and their vision for meta-QS research: finding out whether self quantification can actually bring about desired changes in the people doing it. In their engaging video below, they also suggest how a new age of personal enlightment…
At the upcoming QS Conference (May 28-9, San Jose), Robin Barooah and I will run a session about self-experimentation. Alexandra Carmichael has asked me to write a post about how to do self-experimentation as a kind of encouragement to come to the session. Robin and I will be giving examples of what we have done…
A guest post from Kyle Machulis on his project, OpenYou, a resource for developers that provides lists of open source libraries of health and biometrics equipment.
Julio Terra, a grad student in the Interactive Telecommunications program at NYU, built MoodyJulio after increasingly noticing the role emotions were playing in his life. He wanted to correlate his emotional responses with physiological metrics, activities, and people in his life. It’s like a work in progress to see his emotional landscape in HD. Watch…
QS Boston Meetup #5 was held on Wednesday on the topic “The Science of Sleep,” a subject that comes up here regularly. The event was major success and, to my mind, demonstrated powerfully the potential of the self-experimentation movement and the exceptional people making it happen. Here is a brief recap of the evening, with…
This is a guest post by Beck Tench: This Friday begins a month-long participatory blogging project at the Museum of Life and Science, where I work, called Experimonth – and QS’rs are invited to participate. Experimonth, which started as a personal project for me in 2008, has morphed into an effort to bring scientists and…
Alex Chernavsky has kindly given me several years of weight data he collected by weighing himself daily. He read about the Shangri-La Diet in 2005 and several years later decided to try it. The graph above shows what happened: Starting at 222 pounds (BMI = 32), over 11 months he lost 31 pounds, reaching a…
Here’s a bit of ancient history in the automated self-tracking world. A biography-generating device called Forget-Me-Not was really a lifelogging app before web development and ubiquitous cell phones came along. Watch the video below for a fascinating peek into the past of self-tracking. Thanks to Mik Lamming for sending this in.
Between 2007 and 2009 I spent a ton of time in Twitter before it finally hit me that 1) the net improvement to my life was zilch, and 2) had I thought of it going in as an experiment, I would have quit a long time ago and freed up energy for more effective efforts….
In 1996, I accidentally discovered that if I stood a lot I slept better. If I stood 9 hours or more, I woke up feeling incredibly rested. Yet to get any improvement I had to stand at least 8 hours. That wasn’t easy, and after about 9 hours of standing my feet would start to hurt….
Denis Harscoat is the founder of Quantter and co-organizer of the London Quantified Self group and the new Paris QS group. He and co-founder Francis Dierick noticed people quantifying their activites on Twitter, and created a simple way to gather this data together. In the video below, Denis takes us on a tour of Quantter…
A guest post from Chris Hogg on the value of user-generated data and its ability to reconnect us to our bodies and our health.
Some time ago I was asked for the ultimate productivity tip, and instead of giving a straightforward take-away, I said that in the end the answer is “it depends.” That wasn’t a cheap shot because what works for you might not work for the next guy, and vice versa. Sound familiar? It’s the same case…
Last week the first Quantified Self Meetup took place in Brussels, there were some earlier events, but those didn’t include as much speakers as it did now. So this is the first official one with a recap! I also had the honor to start as the first speaker and my talk was about data-portability and…
In 2007, while training for an Ironman triathlon, one of the many daily QS rituals I did included waking up in the morning and strapping on my heart rate monitor before I got out of bed to measure my resting heart rate (HR). My coach had made it one of the mandatory data points I…
Come join the Quantified Self San Diego crew at HealthCamp San Diego as we host this month’s Show & Tell unconference style! If you live in San Diego or if you are here for Health 2.0 Spring Fling then this is the place for you! This event is a great opportunity to show your best…
