Tag: Health

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Alice Pilgram: My Journey with Diabetes

April 1, 2015

In 2008 Alice Pilgram was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Faced with numerous life changes and having to now track multiple pieces of data, she started to feel overburdened. In this talk, presented at the Bay Area QS meetup group, she explains how a new simple tracking system helped her see the bigger picture.

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Better by Default: An Access Conversation with John Wilbanks

March 10, 2015

John Wilbanks is the Chief Commons Officer for Sage Bionetworks. You may not recognize John’s name or the name of his organization, but after today, you may want to commit it to memory. On March 9, 2014 Tim Cook introduced us to the idea of ResearchKit and then turned it over to Jeff Williams who described the new…

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Conference Preview: Discussing Families & Self-Tracking

April 22, 2014

Last June, the Pew Internet Research Project released a report entitled, Family Caregivers are Wired for Health. The authors – Susannah Fox, Maeve Duggan and Kristen Purcell – found that 40% of Americans are caring for an adult or child with significant health issues. Of special interest to us: “When controlling for age, income, education, ethnicity, and good…

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Fit Fifties, Sound Sixties: Maria Benet on Active Aging

April 10, 2014

Maria Benet began tracking her activity a few years ago as a way to lose weight and take control of her health. What started with a simple pedometer and a few custom Access databases has morphed into a multi-year tracking project that includes news apps and tools. Her progress and data has even spurred her…

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Thomas Christiansen on Learning from 60,000 Observations

March 21, 2014

It’s an iterative process. I’m peeling an onion, and I can continue peeling that onion for the probably the rest of my life. How many times have you sneezed today? This month? Over the last 3 years? Thomas Christiansen knows his sneeze count because he’s been tracking them since 2011. We’ve actually heard from Thomas…

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Nancy Dougherty on Quantified/Unquantified

March 19, 2014

Nancy Dougherty has talked to us in the past about her experiences with exploring self-tracking and how mindfulness interacts with the technological processes of gathering and understanding personal data. In this short Ignite talk, given at the 2013 Quantified Self Global Conference, Nancy digs a bit deeper into her personal experiences when she gave up…

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Pew Internet Research: 21% Self-Track with Technology

January 27, 2013

Today the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released their latest findings in their ongoing research on the role of the Internet and technology in health and wellness. This latest report, Tracking for Health, is of particular interest to the Quantified Self community because it focuses on self-tracking. Thanks to Pew Associate Director,…

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Stuart Calimport on The Memome Project

November 30, 2012

Stuart Calimport is on a quest to find the most useful memes for health and well-being. He started the Human Memome Project, and spent a year and a half collecting all his ideas about health. He classified 5137 of these ideas as healthy/ethical/optimal and 6581 of them as unhealth/unethical/sub-optimal. In the video below, Stuart shares some…

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Numbers From Around the Web: Round 9

June 29, 2012

Some people may be wondering how I find all the amazing people conducting neat self-tracking experiments and creating jaw-dropping personal data visualizations. Well, for the most part I just listen. I’m constantly paying attention to what’s being said on twitter about #QuantifiedSelf. When that doesn’t work I just use the power of Google to find…

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Sky Christopherson on The Quantified Athlete

May 26, 2012

Sky Christopherson is a velodrome cyclist who has been on the U.S. Olympic team. After retiring, he lived in the world of startups, and when his health started to decline as a result of that stress, he turned back to the kind of quantification he had been doing as an athlete to restore his health. In…

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Talking Data With Your Doc : The Patient

March 29, 2012

Data. Health. Communication. In our daily lives, we are keenly aware of the power of each of these individual concepts. However taken together, their influence on our wellbeing, to borrow a phrase from my friend Karen Herzog, “our wholeness”, is exponentially influential. So why do they seem to rarely coalesce during our conversations, discussions, and…

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Ben Ahrens: Cultivating Intuition Through Meticulous Self-Tracking

March 18, 2012

Ben Ahrens got his start in self-tracking as a personal trainer for six years. He was then diagnosed with Lyme disease and spent two years in bed. In the video below, he talks about his tracking failures, the importance of intuition and simplicity, and what he learned about controlling his symptoms by tweaking his mental state. A…

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Matt Velderman on Improving Skin Health

February 27, 2012

Matt Velderman wanted to figure out his acne problem. He dove into researching acne treatments, tracking himself and modifying his diet and behavior. His approach was to try every possible thing that could help at once to solve the problem quickly, and then remove one thing at a time to figure out a minimal set…

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Quantified Self and the Future of Health

February 6, 2012

We here at Quantified Self Labs wanted everyone to know that tonight (Feb 7th, 2012) Gary Wolf will be speaking in San Diego on a panel with Dr. Eric Topol, Larry Smarr and Dr. Joseph Smith about “Quantified Self and the Future of Personal Health.” The panelist for the event include: Gary Wolf is the co-founder…

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Amelia Greenhall: Weigh Everyday = Understanding

January 2, 2012

Amelia Greenhall lost forty pounds with the simple feedback of checking her weight every day. In a bulimic college environment, she set herself some rules starting out: no dieting, and only long-term changes. She read The Hacker’s Diet, and was inspired to track the 10-day moving average of her weight for two years. Watch the…

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Thomas Christiansen: Debugging My Allergy

December 31, 2011

Thomas Chistiansen of Mymee spent three years using a QS approach to reduce his allergies. He recorded his symptoms, intake of food, water, and supplements, as well as sleep, urination, and elimination. Through his careful observations, Thomas has been able to get rid of the eczema on his hands and can now manage through allergy…