Gary Wolf

October 2, 2014

On Wednesday this week we learned that the QS Access app we submitted to the Apple store was approved. This means you can download the QS Access app on iTunes. We hope you’ll find it useful. Our app is a very simple tool for accessing HealthKit data in a table so that you can explore it using Numbers, Excel, R, or any other CSV compatible tool.

It is still early days for HealthKit, but my conversations with toolmakers at Quantified Self events convinces me that there will be many device and software makers that integrate with Apple’s platform for collecting and analyzing personal data. I hope this will allow more people to learn from their own data by reflecting on changes over time and by combining multiple data streams – such as activity, sleep, and nutrition – into a single visualization for comparison.

To give you your HealthKit data in tabular format, we’ve had to simplify it. QS Access shows your data in either “hourly” or “daily” chunks.  These won’t be appropriate for all uses, but many interesting questions can be asked of data that is presented as a time series using hourly and daily values. This is just a starting point, and we’re looking forward to making it do more based on your feedback.

We very much hope that if you learn something from your data using QS Access, you’ll share your project by participating in a Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup and by joining us at QS15 Conference and Exposition next year in San Francisco. Suggestions about the app itself and interesting examples of usage can be shared with us directly by emailing us: labs@quantifiedself.com,

Read a short example of using QS Access to look at my activity data.
Find Support for QS Access in the QS Forum.

The QS Access App was authored by our long time QS Labs friend and collaborator Robin Barooah.