Benn Finn has been battling issues with his sleep ever since he was a teenager. His sleep was suffering from the usual problems we’ve all faced: taking too long to get to sleep, waking up too often, waking up late, and being tired during the day. He made plan to fix his issues by researching…
In 2009 Tim Ngwena switched on Last.fm and he’s been running in across all his devices ever since. Earlier this year he decided to take a deep dive into his listening data to see what he could learn.
This is Adam Johnson’s third QS talk. Previously he’s discussed the lifelogging tool he developed and uses and how he re-learned how to type in order to combat RSI. In this talk, Adam gives an update to his self-tracking focused on three areas: tracking an long-distance cycling trip, his streamlined lifelogging process, and how he’s…
We’ve heard from our friend, and Pittsburgh QS meetup co-organizer, Anne Wright, many times before. She’s a wonderful proponent of the power of self-tracking and using data, research, and continuous exploration to discover and learn about what is meaningful in your life. All of that passion stems from a personal experience with overcoming various health…
Jamie Aspinall was interested in what his location history could tell him. As a Google Location user, his smartphone is constantly pinging his GPS and sending that data back to his Google profile. Using Google Takeout Jamie was able to download the last four years of his location history, which represented about 600,000 data points. In…
The excellent organizers of the London Quantified Self Show&Tell recently fielded a detailed survey about the self-tracking practices in their group. In the video below Ulrich Atz presents their findings. Some of the interesting results from the survey: 105 respondents (22 identified as female, 76 as male). Over 500 unique tools were being used. 47% of…
Adi Andrei wanted to combine artificial intelligence, psychology, art, and storytelling for the purpose of self-discovery of the subconscious mind. In the video below, Adi explains why he’s focused on this, how to go about entering the subconscious, and what he’s learned about hacking it. (Filmed by the London QS Show&Tell meetup group.) Hacking the Unconscious Mind from…
J. Paul Neeley has done experiments on optimizing happiness, self-control, and most recently, puns! His mom and brother are great punsters, so he decided to measure how many puns happened over Thanksgiving weekend with his family. In the video below, J. Paul explains this fun experiment, shares what he learned about the pattern of puns, and warns…
Neil Bachelor has been tracking his daily learning for the past two and a half years, with 3,200 discrete learning events. One of his motivations for this is to create a data-based CV that reflects his real work and learning habits. Neil uses Faviki to bookmark things he’s learned. In the video below, he describes his…
Jules Goldberg is a snorer, and estimates that he has spent 1/8th of his life snoring. The noise was bothering his wife, so he built an app called SnoreLab to quantify his snoring (mild, loud, or epic?) and help him reduce it. In the video below, Jules shares how he identified where his snoring was coming…
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…
Ryota Kanai does brain scans for a living. He can assess a person’s intelligence level, personality traits, and social proclivity from these scans. He even did a study correlating number of friends on Facebook with brain structure. In the video below, Ryota shows a 3-D scan of his brain, highlighted with colors to show where he…
Matt Dobson is working on automatic affect recognition, which basically means quantifying emotions beyond self-reporting. In the video below, Matt walks through the current technologies available to passively detect emotions, helpfully explaining things like galvanic skin response, heart rate variability, and speech tone. He also gives some hints as to where the future of emotion tracking…
The QS London meeting in October (#13) was full of interesting speakers and they’re now available in video form. You can find them all on the London Channel at: London QS Channel The October talks include (in the order presented): Conference Roundup (Adriana Lukas). An Overview for Londoners of the QS Annual Conference. SnoreLab (Jules Goldberg)….
Ian Clements has been self-tracking since 1974 – mostly exercise, weight, and general health indicators. But in 2007 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. This set off a more comprehensive mission of self-tracking to figure out which lifestyle changes and supplements were helping him to live longer. In the video below, Ian walks through his…
Andy Leigh wanted to row around the world from his bedroom. Why? To lose weight and to do some kind of project with the open source hardware Arduino. He chose rowing because it’s a low-impact activity that he can do with his injury. But manual tracking in a spreadsheet was too cumbersome. In the video…
This is a guest post from Ken Snyder of Quantified Self London. Thanks Ken! — I have personally found Magnesium to be a great tool in getting better sleep, although I believe a more common use is to help get more sleep. In any event, I thought it would be interesting to hear from the…
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…
From the London QS Show&Tell group: Jon Cousins talks about the development of Moodscope, a social site where users can track their mood and share their stats with friends. He battled depression secretly for 30 years, and was inspired to invent his own mood-tracking system after a potential bipolar disorder diagnosis. Watch the video below…
From the London QS Show&Tell meetup group: Kiel Gilleade talks about his experiences with tracking his heart rate 24×7 and sharing it in real-time via the Internet. More information about the project can be found at Kiel’s Physiological Computing Site and at his BodyBlogger Twitter stream. Watch the video below to hear Kiel talk about…
