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…
Kiel Gilleade researches physiological computing. He streams his heart rate data to Twitter, live, 24 hours a day. Over the course of a year, he learned how his heart rate responded to different events, dietary intake, and changes in routine. He was also surprised to learn that he didn’t get up until 8 am! His friends and…
Robby MacDonell from RescueTime tried many different tools to form habits, and didn’t find that any of them worked. After a good deal of frustration, he started to investigate the idea of having goals at all. In this great talk, Robby honestly shows data that isn’t pretty – hooray! He also shares some really interesting insights…
So here we are with post #4 in the QS 101 series. We’ve already talked about keeping it simple, using the SMART system, and using social support to help you in your self-tracking process. Today we’re going to talk about what to do once you’ve collected your data – make it visual. The Visual Cortex…
We’re excited to announce the first 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 Data Doesn’t Lie: Orgasm vs. Performance (Dave Asprey) Stress relief with a biofeedback game (Olivier Janin) QS+1 Lessons learned from assisting in trading…
This is a guest post by Sean Munson, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Sean studies individual preferences and nudges, particular for encouraging people to read more diverse political news and helping them to live happier and healthier lives. Personal informatics is inherently tied to behavior: reported behavior, monitored behavior, and planned behavior. When people…
David Philips is a professor at the University of Toronto who studies surveillance. He’s interested in democratizing infrastructures of surveillance and using surveillance data for things other than population control, such as creating senses of self and community. In the video below, he gives an interesting talk about what he has learned about the why…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Mar 4, 2012
Backstory I’ve been on a health kick for the past year. I’ve lost 25lbs, lowered my cholesterol, increased my core strength and my tennis game is mildly respectable (according to me). During this period I’ve been focused on trying to introduce QS techniques to help motivate and inform me. This started with the basics: FitBit…
Nick Winter was inspired by Seth Roberts to track his productivity. He uses the method of percentile feedback, which compares his current productivity to past productivity as he goes about the hours of his days. Nick uses it to help prioritize his work projects, and he gives a short talk about his experience below. (Filmed by…
Karsten W. is on an amazing journey towards understanding his personal finances. Thankfully for us he’s been writing about his methods and what he’s learned along the way over at his blog: FactBased. Let’s dive in! Step 1. Track Karsten decided to use twitter to track his expenses and supplement that data with his normal bank…
The first speaker at last week’s QS meetup in San Francisco was Alexander Grey. He told us about the muscle-activity sensor he had developed and the fascinating things he had learned about himself from using it. The result of many years of thinking and work, he’s now eager to find collaborators, so he jumped at…
This is a guest post by Jakob Eg Larsen, an Associate Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) at the Cognitive Systems Section where he heads the mobile informatics lab (milab). His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal informatics, and augmented cognition. Better understanding of the intricate relations between our brains and behaviors is…
Matt Velderman wanted to figure out his acne problem. He dove into researching acne treatments, tracking himself and modifying his diet and behavior. His approach was to try every possible thing that could help at once to solve the problem quickly, and then remove one thing at a time to figure out a minimal set…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 26, 2012
Hind Hobeika is a swimmer and an engineer from Beirut. She wanted to monitor her heart rate while she was swimming, so she built goggles that sense and display her heart rate in real time. It’s called the Butterfleye Project. In this great talk below, she describes how she designed and assembled the goggles, the…
You are invited to learn and to share your knowledge! What: QS Week – “Self-Knowledge Through Numbers” When: Date To Be Announced Where: all over the world…. 😉 What is QS Week? This September, our Quantified Self community is coming together for a new experiment. Working together, we are going to create a world-wide, week…
Every day you interact with the web. You log on. You upload, you download. You tap and you click. You search, you “like”, you pin, and you retweeet. These actions make the web work for you, but they also make you work for the web. It should come as no surprise to even the casual…
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…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Feb 19, 2012
