This post is a bit scary to write, and will surprise most people who know me, but here goes. 6 months ago, I got my 23andMe genetic test results. They showed mostly what I expected: 30% chance of diabetes, 24% chance of atrial fibrillation, 40x greater risk of Celiac disease than the general population. All…
A post calling for Quantified Self entries to Institute for the Future’s contest, BodyShock: ideas to transform lifestyles and the human body to improve health in the next decade.
I’d love your feedback on this question. Last Friday morning, I met with Aman Bhandari in President Obama’s Chief Technology Office. It was an intense 45 minutes! Aman is coordinating the Community Health Data Initiative, which involves taking the datasets that HHS has recently released to the public, incorporating other datasets through partnerships, and inspiring…
QS is not going to become another health care blog, but I wanted to promote these excellent slides out of the comments section from the previous post on Quantified Self business models. Rajiv Mehta and Hugh Dubberly gave a talk recently that will be valuable to anybody thinking about QS in the context of health….
Last Tuesday I received an invitation from Esther Dyson and Jen McCabe to attend a small, private workshop on the business side of user-generated health. The workshop was to be held the very next day. Despite this short notice, more than 30 people showed up, some of whom flew across the country to attend. Their…
I found the following announcement from Tech-On via a tweet by Scot Kozicki, and found it very entertaining. A company called WIN Human Recorder Co Ltd has launched a new device to collect multiple streams of biometric data. There are all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of this version of the universal biometric collection…
Non Invasive Health Monitoring with mHealth View more documents from Bart Collet. Is health going mobile? It certainly seems so. Belgian blogger Bart Collet posted this fantastic compilation of tools and services for mobile health. Many of the companies in this presentation I hadn’t ever heard of before, which goes to show how quickly this…
With the explosion of microblogging, tweeting, and status updates, it is clear that embedding personal metrics in social tools is on the tips of our fingers and is a natural extension to the personal toolbox. This post explores the opportunity of OHME (Open Mobile Health Exchange), a first-mover in the new world of Microsyntax, and a new…
The Mayo Clinic held their Transforming Healthcare Symposium last week in Rochester, MN. On display were the latest innovations they are brewing up in their SPARC Innovation Lab, like real-time, on-screen specialist consultation when you go to visit your primary care doctor. A stellar lineup of speakers from Intel’s Craig Barrett to IDEO’s Tim Brown…
You “own” your own health data. That is clear if you generate it yourself, as self-trackers do. But even when others generate health data for you, you should have full access and “ownership” of it. They are only “borrowing” the data. But not every health care provider makes it easy to get cheap access to…
I’ve long been interested in medical self-care. The idea of patients taking responsibility of their own health and healing seems to me to be essential in the long run. Quantified Self was started in part to collect a certain kind of tool that (among other reasons) might give you data which could be used to…
The US Department of Homeland Security has invented a Star Trek-like tricorder. Called the Standoff Patient Triage Tool (SPTT), it can measure pulse, body temperature, and respiration from up to 40 feet away. The obvious application is for emergency response teams, but why not have a tricorder stationed conveniently in your bedroom and office to…
A common question people ask me is, “Why do you track yourself?” The primary answer, for anyone living with chronic pain, is simple — to help reduce the pain. Migraine, for example, is a chronic condition where self-tracking can have a positive effect. According to the National Headache Foundation, migraine affects 13% of the US…
Quantified Self member Melanie Swan has just published an open access paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health called “Emerging Patient-Driven Health Care Models: An Examination of Health Social Networks, Consumer Personalized Medicine and Quantified Self-Tracking“. She presents a thorough, well-documented analysis of the players and issues in the personalized health…
I was curious to see if I was the only one crazy enough to share my health data publicly, so last week I posted two questions as my Facebook status. “Would you track your health on Facebook (weight, calories, sleep, exercise) for all your friends to see?”, followed by “What if it was completely private…
Here’s your chance to share your self-measurement expertise for an upcoming book, The Decision Tree. (Look for the invitation link at the end of this post.) Thomas Goetz, deputy editor of Wired Magazine, has started a new blog-to-be-book about predictive medicine and the future of healthcare. It promises to be a topic close to the…
As Gary mentioned in his earlier post, I track myself – 40 things about my body, mind, and activity – every day. The fact that I do this tracking seems to interest people. Whether they are driven by curiosity about the phenomenon of personal data collection, or by the desire for a yardstick by which…
The art of constant self-awareness and self-experimentation is essential to the habit of self-metrics. Occasionally a trained scientist can take a small signal from their own life and turn it into a falsifiable result. I found the following note of such self-observation on the website for The People’s Pharmacy. This center for patient submitted alternative…
A post discussing the role of home monitoring systems in the future of long term care for the elderly.
Health Vault is a new initiative from Microsoft that intends to be a solution for putting medical records “online” in a secure and practical way. So far it has gotten some good reviews from progressive doc blogs, such as Medical Quack, primarily because of the “secure” part of the equation. In fact Health Vault’s tagline…
