Evan Savage has panic attacks, especially triggered by caffeine while driving. In late 2011, he was having multiple panic attacks a week. He didn’t want to take drugs, so he made his own recovery plan – logging his food, exercise, and panic attacks. He eliminated caffeine, and thought he had recovered, then relapsed. In the…
In talking with many toolmakers, I find myself constantly surprised by how different people approach the same, and seemingly simple, issue with very different perspectives. A few months ago I wrote about Mood Panda which went from private to community. In contrast, Michael Forrest’s Happiness has evolved from shared to private. I also find Michael’s experimentation with the…
Gareth MacLeod is a developer/entrepreneur interested in making QS techniques easy to incorporate into daily life. He built an app that sends him text messages to ask about his sleep, mood, romantic encounters, tooth brushing, etc. He then looks for correlations among the different data streams, and even spent 100 hours building a correlation heat…
Randy Sargent has an hypothesis that eating certain foods, like tomatoes, makes him irritable and anxious. He asked himself, “How can I structure an experiment on myself so that I don’t know whether I’m eating tomatoes or not?” and “How would I go about quantifying my irritability?” In the video below, he explores ways to…
I have finally figured out my mood! After 16 months and 300,000 words of mood tracking data, which I shared with a friend, I have a painstakingly compiled list of hacks that balance my extreme mood swings and make life much smoother for me. So, like a good QS’er, I’m sharing what I learned. Maybe…
Our QS Conferences are organized to maximize discovery and serendipity. The entire program results from us inviting attendees to present and participate. You’re never quite sure what you’ll get, but it’s hardly ever boring! I didn’t know what to expect when Caspar Addyman took the stage in Amsterdam to talk about “Tracking your brain on…
In 2007, Jon Cousins started tracking his mood to help NHS psychiatrists decide if he was cyclothymic (a mild form of bipolar disorder). After a few months of tracking, he started sharing his scores with a friend, who expressed concern when his score was low. Jon’s mood sharply improved, apparently because of the sharing. This…
In 2006, PhD student Ian Li created Moodjam to let people track their moods in color. At the QS Europe conference last November, he met artist Laurie Frick, who creates beautiful works of art from her data. She mentioned that she was using Moodjam, and this inspired Ian to make a new version of it! In the video…
About three years ago, Gary Wolf wrote a detailed post on Measuring Mood — some tools are complicated enough to get you grouchy! Gallup goes through a lot of trouble to gauge the US happiness level on a daily basis. Others take a simple approach, such as Eric Kennedy’s recent talk at the Seattle QS meetup on Tracking…
-This review was written by Craig Protzel for my class DIY Health at NYU ITP (Tisch School of the Arts). In this class, students design systems of self-care that help people take stock of themselves by exploring ways to measure, reflect and act upon their health and lifestyle.- Marie Dapuch’s “Mood Tracking” is very much focused…
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…
A colleague I’ll call John has decided to start tracking his mood for a long period of time (years). He explains why: A few years ago, after a severe manic attack, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The attack was preceded by an intense period of stress, then two weeks of elevated mood, increased social…
Nancy Dougherty made her own set of “mindfulness pills” – placebos labeled Focus, Willpower/Energy, Calm, and Happy. The pills were embedded with sensors that transmitted signals to her phone, recording each time she took the different pills, as well as her heart rate, activity rate, and sleep. Nancy works at Proteus Biomedical, in case you’re…
By popular request, we have just launched a global QS forum at: http://forum.quantifiedself.com/ Gary, Dan Dascalescu, and I took some exciting topics from the conference and turned them into forum discussions, with expert moderators to help explore ideas and answer questions. You’ll find discussions on: – Apps & Tools, moderated by Dan Dascalescu – Data Ownership & Privacy,…
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…
This is the intimate story of the last 6 months of my life, and how it changed for the better by sharing my mood. For some reason, writing publicly about mood feels much more vulnerable than other kinds of data. Maybe it’s because emotions get more to the core of our beings than weight or…
Julio Terra, a grad student in the Interactive Telecommunications program at NYU, built MoodyJulio after increasingly noticing the role emotions were playing in his life. He wanted to correlate his emotional responses with physiological metrics, activities, and people in his life. It’s like a work in progress to see his emotional landscape in HD. Watch…
This is a guest post by Beck Tench: This Friday begins a month-long participatory blogging project at the Museum of Life and Science, where I work, called Experimonth – and QS’rs are invited to participate. Experimonth, which started as a personal project for me in 2008, has morphed into an effort to bring scientists and…
George Lawton studies happiness, and how to have more of it. In the video below, he talks about emotional feedback tools, his research on how to incrementally increase happiness, and how he tried to change his mood by changing his facial expressions. George also discusses mirror meditation as a way to increase emotional well-being, engages…
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…
