We’ve all come face to face with tracking some aspect of our life only to realize that we’re not quite sure how to get started. Enrico Bertini encountered this roadblock when he began thinking about tracking the amount of time he spends engaging in “focused work.” As an information visualization researcher at NYU he decided…
In 2013, Kate, Ernesto, and I created a Friends of QS program to help fund our work at QS Labs, which includes putting on our QS conferences and events, maintaining the web site and video programming, and creating opportunities for our vibrant global community to connect. We reached out to friends in our network of…
A big piece of our work at QS Labs is supporting our worldwide community through the over 100 Quantified Self Meetups (see our sidebar at right). At our local meetup in the Bay Area, and others we’ve had the pleasure of visiting, we are consistently observing that nearly half of the attendees are new to…
“If I look at this, I have these memories, and I remember this was a good year.” Collect it and forget it. This could be be hidden mantra of many people engaged with self-tracking, myself included. I will readily admit to buying a device or application with the hope that I can collect enough information…
Science. Someone makes an observation, creates a hypothesis, tests it, then analyzes the results against the hypothesis. Hopefully once a conclusion is reached it is tested again and again for validity and reproducibility. With self-tracking, the world of personal science and experimentation is opening up real-world personal laboratories to test the findings, claims, and promises…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 23, 2014
In this short talk Bethany Soule, founder of Beeminder, a goal setting and commitment tool, describes what happened when they started using it to “mind” the development of the service itself.
There are no shortage of apps and devices to track our various physical activities. Going for run? A few laps at the pool? An early morning hike? All of these are trackable with data delivered and archived in a variety of different ways. Mike McDearmon loves to get outdoors, and he also loves tracking his…
At Quantified Self Labs, we create and host events that bring together our community of trackers, toolmakers, researchers, and other individuals interested in how self-tracking is shaping our culture. We focus mainly on meetups and conferences. With the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference coming up in May, we thought we’d let you know what makes it a unique and rewarding…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 16, 2014
Kevin Krejci was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease last year. At a recent Bay Area QS Meetup, Kevin shared his story of how he’s using self-tracking applications and devices to help him monitor different symptoms and outcomes related to his diagnosis. Watch his talk below to hear about his triumphs and challenges.
Rob Rothfarb has an artificial aortic heart valve. It requires him to take anticoagulation therapy so that he reduces his risk of blood clots. It also requires constant monitoring to ensure that he is within target ranges. Rob learned that different lifestyle factors and genetic susceptibility was related to how effective his therapy was so…
At the beginning of 2013 Kendra Albert set herself a very ambitious goal of reading five books a week. After tracking her reading by using Goodreads and writing short book reviews she realized that what she was reading wasn’t matching up to what she wanted to read. Watch her short talk with and the Q&A…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 9, 2014
Katrina Rodzon thought she was a relatively healthy person until she realized that seemingly disconnected symptoms pointed towards something real, a gluten intolerance. She took this hunch and decided to test it out using a simple elimination diet along with tracking her weight and subjective bloating and mood ratings. Watch her great talk from our…
In three months we’ll be gathering again in Amsterdam for our third Quantified Self Europe Conference. Since 2011 we’ve seen this event grow into an amazing experience. We spend a lot of time working with attendees to find those special projects and experiments that show the diversity of the self-tracking experience. We’ve been honored to…
With a projected 90 Million wearables to ship this year, it’s no surprise that different form factors are entering the marketplace. At our 2013 Global Conference we were excited to have Stephane Marceau, the co-founder and CEO of OMsignal, give a short talk about their technology and how he’s using it to track his life….
As you may know, we get excited when someone in our community uses interesting data visualizations to help tell their self-tracking story. Jana Beck is no exception. As a woman living with Type 1 diabetes she’s constantly learning how to better understand what her Dexcom data is telling her. In this talk, Jana follows up…
Since he was a child Mark Moschel has been a basketball fan. Growing up in Chicago he became a fan of Michael Jordan. What really captured his attention was the act of dunking a basketball. As an adult, and still a basketball fan, Mark decided he wanted to set a new goal for himself –…
Aaron Rowe is a biochemist and researcher. When he realized that his lifestyle was leading him towards a unhealthy future he designed and tested an intervention to lower his cholesterol through nutritional supplements. In this talk, filmed at the Bay Area QS Meetup Group, Aaron describes his testing methods and his results from testing for…
