I’ve long been interested in medical self-care. The idea of patients taking responsibility of their own health and healing seems to me to be essential in the long run. Quantified Self was started in part to collect a certain kind of tool that (among other reasons) might give you data which could be used to…
Tonight’s Bay Area QS Show&Tell will be fun and interesting. There are a number of people who have told me in advance that they have something to show, and as always you are welcome to present your self-tracking projects spontaneously as well. Our host is Orange Labs, the research and development group of France Telecom;…
Last night was the inaugural NYC version of the Bay Area QS Show&Tell held at Parsons The New School for Design, on the newly renovated ground floor in the “Bark” Orientation Room (it’s literally covered in bark). Presentations included lots of very original and self-expressive charts of stuff tracked. Mimi Chun presented some beautiful artifacts…
Please join New York QS readers at the first NYC QS Show&Tell tonight. There is a great lineup, a great location, and a high probability of an interesting, fun evening. For location and time details, follow the link above to the NYC Quantified Self Meetup page. The Show&Tell format will be the same as the…
The US Department of Homeland Security has invented a Star Trek-like tricorder. Called the Standoff Patient Triage Tool (SPTT), it can measure pulse, body temperature, and respiration from up to 40 feet away. The obvious application is for emergency response teams, but why not have a tricorder stationed conveniently in your bedroom and office to…
What do we see in the mirror of our data? A couple of recent stories bring this question to mind. The first comes from Adam Bryant’s profile in the New York Times of Jim Collins, author of business advice books that have sold millions of copies. Collins is tremendously successful; a few hours of his…
We’re happy to announce that we’ve got a date and location for the next QS Show&Tell. The SF group will meet on June 9 at Orange Labs in South San Francisco. The program has been so much fun that we’re just going to keep doing it the same way. There will be a series of…
A survey from Ian Li, a PhD student studying personal informatics at Carnegie Mellon University, asking for insight to guide his research project looking into the general challenges of personal informatics.
Politicians have always been self-trackers. In the flow of political action, you need a notebook just to keep track of people’s names. But when a recent political controversy was resolved by the notebooks of the most conscientious self-tracker in the history of the United States Senate, the reputation of people interested in personal data got…
Noticing that flaxseed oil improved my balance led me to measure its effects on other tests of brain function. It also made me wonder what else in my life affected how well my brain works. Eventually I measured the mental effects of flaxseed oil with four tests, but each had problems: Balance. Time-consuming (15 minutes…
Today we’re going to learn how to build your own multi-purpose mobile self-tracking application. The origin of this simple tracking method lies in the second QS Show&Tell when I outlined my dream self-tracking system and expressed a wish that somebody would build it. Among other things, I wanted an easy way to capture any kind…
Nathan Yau at the FlowingData blog has compiled a list of “37 Data-ish Blogs You Should Know About.” His list includes blogs on statistics, visualizations, maps, design, and “others worth noting,” a category that includes our own Quantified Self blog. Thanks Nathan! (Adding Nathan’s blog to the list makes 38.) Happy RSS-ing!
Deep mysteries of human nature will be exposed by self-tracking, aspects of our behavior so disconcerting and bizarre that they will lead us to question whether we understand ourselves at all. I know this is true because such disconcerting results are already being produced at a rapid pace by experimental psychologists, and self-tracking brings the…
A common question people ask me is, “Why do you track yourself?” The primary answer, for anyone living with chronic pain, is simple — to help reduce the pain. Migraine, for example, is a chronic condition where self-tracking can have a positive effect. According to the National Headache Foundation, migraine affects 13% of the US…
The New Yorker has a very good article on self-experimenters — mostly college students — using cognitive enhancers, beyond the traditional caffine and NoDoz. It’s unclear how many of these folks are quantifying their experiments, but they should be. A few excerpts: The effects of piracetam on healthy volunteers have been studied even less than…
I’ve been meaning to link to this post for a couple of weeks. Nathan Yau over at Flowing Data has been writing personal data collection projects quite a bit. In this post, A Perfect Personal Data Collection Application, he talks about what is missing from current tools and about his dream system for personal data…
Self Quantifiers in New York now have their own QS Show&Tell Meetup, courtesy of Steve Dean, who has been following QS almost since its inception. Steve was out here in the Bay Area for the second Show&Tell we had last year, and he has arranged to have the first meeting at Parsons, The New School…
In this inspiring talk from the recent QS Show&Tell, author, scientist, and self-experimentalist Seth Roberts explains why worries about experimental design are overblown. You will learn what’s wrong with your experiments by starting to do them.
As John Herrman writes: Man Builds Chair that Tweets His Farts, Single-Handedly Justifies Twitter’s Existence. Today’s New York Times has a story about twitter that, in passing, points out that SMS offers a pretty convenient format for automatic monitoring human behavior. But I think the automatic flatulence detecting office chair tells the same story, more…
Self-tracking is about self knowledge. But what if the knowledge you want is contained in the minds of others? In these videos, Joe and Lisa Betts-LaCroix discuss self-tracking in a relationship, and Paul Sas shares his proposal for a “dynamical dinner party.”
