Dr. Mark Drangsholt is a long-time self-tracker who also teaches evidence-based medicine at the University of Washington. He has tracked blood pressure and exercise, atrial fibrillation and what triggers it, deep sleep and sex, diet and body fat. In the video below, Mark shares what he learned about his arrhythmia triggers, and how his self-tracking data…
James Norris asks the Singapore QS audience, “Do you remember your first kiss?” In the 16 years since his first kiss at age 13, James calculated that he has had 1,500 “firsts.” For the past three years, he has been tracking his goals, according to how happy, fulfilled, and productive he feels every day. In…
Bill Schuller started tracking his exercise and weight in 2010, and got into the habit of talking about his numbers each night at the dinner table. Before long, his kids got interested in tracking too. In the video below, Bill talks about what he learned and tells some fun stories, including one about a tracking…
Data. Health. Communication. In our daily lives, we are keenly aware of the power of each of these individual concepts. However taken together, their influence on our wellbeing, to borrow a phrase from my friend Karen Herzog, “our wholeness”, is exponentially influential. So why do they seem to rarely coalesce during our conversations, discussions, and…
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…
Matthew Kay is a PhD student in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He develops technology to help people understand and improve their sleep habits, motivated partially by his own poor sleep habits. He works with Julie Kientz and Shwetak Patel. Clinical sleep centers can easily evaluate a person’s sleep quality, but…
Last Thursday, twenty people gathered in Beirut, Lebanon for the first QS meetup there. It was organized by the wonderful Hind Hobeika, and had presentations by a biomedical engineer studying human motion and a competitive outdoor sports enthusiast, as well as talks about a data analysis project on cortisone and tracking blood coagulation rate. Some pictures…
Ulrich Atz was curious about measuring his stress levels. He chose three methods to do this: experience sampling, day reconstruction method, and heart rate. In the video below, he helpfully describes how he went about designing his experiment, how the different methods work and the challenges of each one, and what he learned. He was…
We’re excited to announce a new batch of talks and sessions at the upcoming QS conference. Thanks to everyone who is stepping up to speak! Check out these awesome topics: Show&Tell Talks My 28-Hour Day Experiments (Joe Betts-LaCroix) Quantified Awesome: Tracking Time, Clothes, Stuff, and Other Little Things (Sacha Chua) World class performance through sleep quantification…
Alex Grey is developing a better kind of muscle sensor, to help people see their muscle activity patterns and change behaviors like typing or running to be more effective and less painful. The sensors are wireless, stick to your skin, and can measure different kinds of muscle activity including arm/leg (EMG) and heart muscles (ECG)….
On Tuesday March 12, Nick Dawson asked if there was a Quantified Self Twitter Chat. Lots of interest followed so we decided to make it happen. We had the very first #qschat twitter chat last Thursday and it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about what people are thinking and doing in the…
This is a guest post by Dominikus Baur, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary. Dominikus is interested in personal visualization – how to make the large amounts of personal data available online accessible to their creators through visualization. His previous projects focused on visualizing personal music listening histories. Our busy daily lifes often make…
SJSU grad student Adam Butterfield did some analysis of the QS meetup groups around the world, and he recently passed this sheet around at one of our QS Discussion Group meetings. I think it’s an amazing way to see the growth in the number of QS meetup groups! The timeline runs from June 2008 to March 2012 (click…
Ben Ahrens got his start in self-tracking as a personal trainer for six years. He was then diagnosed with Lyme disease and spent two years in bed. In the video below, he talks about his tracking failures, the importance of intuition and simplicity, and what he learned about controlling his symptoms by tweaking his mental state. A…
George Lawton was kind enough to take notes at our most recent QS Discussion Group meetup. Here is his summary, below. The QS Meetup on March 13th in Mountain View was great fun, and covered a variety of topics ranging from nutrient tracking, classifying large archives of footage, quantifed-mind.com, and pH tracking, and newly disclosed…
On March 8th, 2012 Stephen Wolfram opened the curtains and gave the world a glimpse of his own self-tracking and personal analytics practice. It was jaw-dropping. It was dense. It was beautiful. And, it might have shown us the future of what the Quantified Self could become. We were lucky enough to have Dr. Wolfram…
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…
This is a guest post by Patrick Burns, who is a PhD candidate in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. He is researching the use of technology to promote physical activity. His interests include ubiquitous and wearable computing and ambient displays. According to the World Health Organization…
This is a “mark your calendars” post to let you know about some fun QS-related stuff coming up that’s not sold out yet! March 20 – The Uploaded Life: Personal evolution through self tracking — MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) event, Stanford GSB Cemex Auditorium 6:00 – 7:00 pm Demos, Networking and Refreshments; 7:00 – 8:30 pm…
