On September 11, Lindsay Meyer was hiking with a group of friends when she suddenly lost all hearing in one ear. In the video below, she compares her experience with the California medical system to her own independent investigation through Google searches and apps. Lindsay draws a startling conclusion about the relative time and cost…
Boston QS organizer Michael Nagle gathers a panel of people in the social health space, and asks them: if not all behaviors can be incentivized, who are the users that succeed with your platform, and who are the users that fail? Dr. Joseph Kvedar of the Center for Connected Health, Rick Lee of Healthrageous, Jackie Thong…
Ari cured himself of Crohn’s disease by experimenting with some unusual supplements, nutrition and fitness regimens, and tracking every bit of it. Four years ago, Ari was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. After a couple of years of intense pain, sixteen pills a day, and yet another visit to the hospital, he decided to take control…
John Sumser had a 7-year period of disasters after he quit smoking. He faced cancer twice, diabetes, asthma, divorce, family death, and more. Throughout this period, he was measuring himself. As he went back through his data, he found one central thing underlying all of his problems – stress. John tells his colorful story and…
This is one of the findings in the amazing Susannah Fox‘s recent report for Pew Internet, part of the Pew Research Center. The report is called The Social Life of Health Information, and has several interesting findings. Here is an excerpt: Carol Torgan, a health science strategist, points out that anyone who makes note of…
In this video, Rajiv Mehta talks about the importance of remembering for good experimentation — carrying out the experiment as planned and capturing the results properly — and the difficulty of doing this well. He described a new app, Tonic, that helps people remember and keep track of their health activities, and shared examples of people…
At the Quantified Self Conference, coming up May 28-29 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, we’ll be having a participatory breakout to explore the topic of Personalized Life Extension: what can each one of us do to quantify and optimize those factors that affect our individual health and longevity. We’ll kick off…
A guest post from Kyle Machulis on his project, OpenYou, a resource for developers that provides lists of open source libraries of health and biometrics equipment.
Alex Chernavsky has kindly given me several years of weight data he collected by weighing himself daily. He read about the Shangri-La Diet in 2005 and several years later decided to try it. The graph above shows what happened: Starting at 222 pounds (BMI = 32), over 11 months he lost 31 pounds, reaching a…
A guest post from Chris Hogg on the value of user-generated data and its ability to reconnect us to our bodies and our health.
Come join the Quantified Self San Diego crew at HealthCamp San Diego as we host this month’s Show & Tell unconference style! If you live in San Diego or if you are here for Health 2.0 Spring Fling then this is the place for you! This event is a great opportunity to show your best…
A guest post from futurist Walter de Brouwer on his suggestions for the ‘periodic table’ of tracking gadgets still to be invented.
With so many exciting developments in the QS world, the air at Adaptive Path was full of energy for the 17th Bay Area QS Show&Tell last week. The theme this time was health and medicine. I watched on the livestream (big thanks to Robin Barooah and Justine Lam for setting this up!), so I missed all the…
This story from the Wall Street Journal describes the growing market for lab tests available directly to everybody, without a doctor visit. (The companies involved have a doctor on board, as a regulatory formality, but the doctor doesn’t do anything.) I’m interested in hearing from people who are regularly running their own lab tests! I’m…
Here’s some good news for those of you who live outside the San Francisco Bay Area or who weren’t able to RSVP in time for tomorrow’s QS Show&Tell meetup. This will be the first time that we will be livestreaming the event. The theme for this meetup is health and medicine, and details to catch…
Here’s a video clip on health tracking from RedeTV!, one of Brazil’s biggest TV stations. Steven Dean, organizer of the New York QS Show&Tell meetup group, gives a great overview of some tools he uses to track his health, and a Brazilian doctor weighs in with his perspective on the benefit to patients. It’s in…
This is a guest post by Sastry Nanduri, co-founder of one of our annual sponsors, HealthTap. Please comment below if you’d like to be part of the “personal data hackathon” Sastry is suggesting: — HealthTap is an avid supporter and sponsor of Quantified Self. We share Quantified Self’s belief that quantification and measurement can lead to insightful…
In advance of our next Bay Area Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup, which will have a Health and Medicine theme, this roundup post is on health- and medicine-related self-tracking tools. Blood pressure, genetics, medical test results, blood sugar readings, hormone levels, dietary experiments – if you have a self-tracking project, gadget, or app, we want to…
It was a standing-room-only, energized gathering at Microsoft on Wednesday evening. Over 140 people came out to listen, connect, and discuss lifelogging at our biggest QS Show&Tell meetup to date!
Earlier this summer Alexandra Carmichael, who is the founder of CureTogether as well as our director here at the Quantified Self, was in Washington for a meeting in President Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). When Alex came back she posted a report about her meeting here on the blog, and invited us…
