On May 10-11th we hosted the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Hundreds of self-trackers, toolmakers, scientists, and enthusiasts came together to share, learn, and discuss how we can create personal meaning through personal data. The conference featured over 100 different sessions that included Show&Tell talks, Breakouts on a wide variety of topics, and inspirational and…
Joris Janssen is a researcher who’s focused his work on combining sensing algorithms with psychological insights. Currently he’s a researcher and developer at Sense Observation Systems, a Netherlands-based company developing context-aware computing. In this talk, filmed at the Amsterdam QS meetup group, Joris gives a brief explanation of the work they do at SenseOS, then…
Sarah Lewington and Michelle Hughes study and teach fashion communication at Nottingham Trent University. In the 5-minute Ignite talk below, they talk about designing with empathy for a project they’re doing with Unilever, with more questions than answers, such as: what is the relative importance of data and functionality vs. emotional attachment to a device?…
Jakob Larsen and his team at the Mobile Informatics Lab at the Technical University of Denmark have developed a way to build a real-time 3-D model of your brain using a smartphone and the Emotiv EPOC game controller headset. In the Ignite talk below, Jakob describes how the fourteen sensors in this mobile EEG device rival…
Ulrich Atz was curious about measuring his stress levels. He chose three methods to do this: experience sampling, day reconstruction method, and heart rate. In the video below, he helpfully describes how he went about designing his experiment, how the different methods work and the challenges of each one, and what he learned. He was…
We’re excited to announce that the videos from the Quantified Self Europe conference in Amsterdam are starting to come online! I’ll be posting them individually here on the blog, but if you can’t wait for that, you can find some of them here on Vimeo. Also, QS Amsterdam member Kees Plattel put together this beautiful…
There are many ways to experience a conference, especially one with so many inspiring overlapping sessions presented by attendees. My personal bias is towards mood tracking, so that’s mostly what I paid attention to this weekend, as well as meeting all the impressive quantifiers who came! If you want to look back over the conference,…
In the last session of the day, we had a few experimental talks on noticing how food changes physical condition. It was also an interesting series of talks that shows the importance of collecting our own subjective data to back up or refute the other technological data that we might also have access to. I…
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…
A recent meeting of the Amsterdam Quantified Self group saw a talk about health insights gleaned through accidental lifelogging. The speaker (who asked not to be named) has bipolar disorder, and has been using last.fm over the past 7 years to track his music listening and compare it with his friends’ music patterns. He talks about…
Ted Punt talks about a device developed by TNO (Dutch Institute for Applied Science) to measure vital signs from people at a distance of up to 10 meters. Heart rate, body motion, and respiration are measured continuously and wirelessly with this device, which should be on the market within a year. He goes into some…
Victor van Doorn describes himself as a nostalgic workaholic. He has tried and failed to keep diaries, so he decided to build an automatic one. His iPhone app Replay My Day (@replaymyday) collects his location and online activities each day, and builds it into a film – so when he’s lying in bed at night…
Joost Plattel quantifies 67% of his life. His dataset from 2010 has 40,000 data points. One way he tried to make sense of all this data was by building a heatmap of his public transportation data. He plans to build it out by integrating Foursquare, Twitter, Google latitude, and iPhone location data to get a…
It’s been almost 2 months, but on the sixteenth of May we held our third meetup of QS Amsterdam. We moved our venue again to the Waag which kindly offered us their space. Our first speaker discovered a strange pattern in his listening habits according to Last.fm. It turns out he stopped listening to music and…
Willempje Vrins and Leonieke Verhoog thought running was boring, and wanted to find a way to make it more beautiful and fun. They invented Figurerunning, and are building a community around it. With apps like Runkeeper, they run specific routes that make make shapes like hearts and soccer players. Then they share their drawings/runs on…
What if you had a movie of your life that was made from a stream of pictures taken one every thirty seconds? Glenn Wolters and Jeroen Bos have built an iPhone app called Lifelapse to do this. They developed it as a school project. I noticed Joost Plattel using it at the recent QS conference…
In the talk below, Ben Blench shares his experience tracking his infant, including a discussion of the different tools he has used. He makes an interesting comparison between digital and analog, noticing that digital tools often have too many features and lack flexibility. (Filmed at the Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup in Amsterdam at Mediamatic) Ben…
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…
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…
