We recently announced that we’re collaborating several other editors to edit a special “focus theme” on N-of-1 experiments for the established informatics journal, Methods of Information in Medicine. N-of-1 Call For Papers (PDF) Here’s an extract from our justification for the call: Scientific progress in medicine and public health during the last century has been…
In this talk, Randy Sargent shows how he used a spectrogram, a tool mostly used for audio, to better understand his own biometric data. A spectrogram was preferable to a line graph for its ability to visualize a large number of data points. As Randy points out, an eeg sensor can produce 100 million data…
In this talk, Richard Sprague shares his attempt to improve his sleep quality by increasing the amount of bifidobacterium in his gut through eating potato starch. You’ll learn why he took the extreme step of flushing his digestive tract and rebuilding it from scratch.
I haven’t been doing these for awhile, but that does not mean that Quantified Self meetups have not been occurring. Far from it. If you are in the Washington D.C. area, there is a meetup on Friday, September 9th with presentations on using data to personalize one’s fitness regimen and how to use heart rate…
Ellis Bartholomeus has many of the standard self-tracking tools like pedometers, heart rate monitors, and eeg sensors. But she explored a different type of tool when a friend gave her a logbook with a place to record her daily mood by drawing a smiley or frowny face on a colored circle. Although it initially felt like…
Peter Torelli had $2000 saved when he entered college. He knew that it wouldn’t last long, so he had to be careful about his spending. He switched to using a credit card in order to have a record of his purchases and reconciled his accounts every month. It became a habit that he kept for…
The emergence of self-tracking tools that came with the advent of the smartphone was a boon for people like Shannon Conners, who have long been recording their personal data with pen and paper. Her lifelong collection of personal data has lead to the creation of insightful visualizations.
Archived livestream footage from the 2016 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium hosted in San Diego, an annual event bringing together toolmakers and public health researchers to support new discoveries about our health and the health of our communities grounded in accurate self-observation.
Abe had an issue with staying up too late. The early morning hours often found him on his couch, working on his laptop. The problem is that he simply lost track of time. To help make his bedtime unforgettable, Abe built a reminder he could not ignore. He wrote a simple app that uses colors to…
Mark Leavitt has a unique perspective in that he is both an engineer and a physician. In his retirement, he is applying his wealth of knowledge to keeping himself healthy. In this talk, Mark looks at how heart rate variability relates to his willpower.
Like many, Akhsar Kharebov found healthy weight loss to be an emotionally difficult process, but the Withings smart scale led to a breakthrough for him. In this talk he discusses how data helped him gain the self control to overcome temptations.
In this final talk from the QS Public Health Symposium, we asked two leading advocates for a culture of health to help set an agenda for our movement over the next year. Bryan Sivak is the former CTO of the US Department of Health and Human Services, and Lori Melichar is a director at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Nate Heintzman is a member of the research and development team at Dexcom, makers of the leading continuous glucose monitor for people with diabetes. In this talk, Nate explains why Dexcom has decided to treat its lead users as collaborators, even when their ingenuity, advocacy and inspiring impatience leads them to step beyond regulatory and business frontiers.
Joyce Lee is a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Michigan and a leader in developing methods of collaborative clinical research with patient communities. In this talk from QSPH15, Joyce describes why patients are leading the way in developing new kinds of science, experimentation, and models of communicating knowledge based on her experience working with CGM in the Cloud, an online group supporting the DIY data project Nightscout.
Howard Look is the founder and CEO of Tidepool.org, a non-profit open source effort to build better software for diabetes. He became a leading advocate for access after his daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and discovering how crucial data was being locked away in devices for managing the condition. In this talk from QSPH15, Howard describes the role of Tidepool and the larger challenge of opening up diabetes data.
Dana Lewis and her partner Scott Leibrand have been developing a DIY artificial pancreas that is built on top of the data flows from Dana’s continuous glucose monitor. In this talk from QSPH15, Dana describes the role that access to data plays in the DIY pancreas, which has had immediate and profoundly positive effects on her life.
Aaron Coleman has built his entire company, Fitabase, around the needs of researchers to authorize and integrate physical activity data from trackers like the Fitbit. In this talk from QSPH15, Aaron discusses what it takes to bridge the gap between the companies designing the devices generating health data and the researchers looking to make sense of it.
