Georgios Papastefanou gave us an overview of the emotions and sensations that can be measured through a device. Tiredness is measured as a decrease in sympathetic nervous system activation. Fear also has very distinct physical markers. Happiness is more difficult to quantify. There’s also a difference between the self-reported emotions of young men vs what…
I led a very interesting discussion at Quantified Self Europe this morning with about 10 attendees with a variety of backgounds. There were entrepreneurs who wanted to start genetic information based companies, a designer, a think tank analyst, and people who are just interested in where the field is and where it was going. The…
An excited, sold-out crowd is gathered in Amsterdam today for our first Quantified Self Europe conference. You can follow along on Twitter with the hashtags #qs2011 and #qseurope. To give a bit of background for our Dutch readers, here is a video of Martijn Aslander, one of the QS Europe organizers, at a recent talk…
Melanie Swan of DIY Genomics describes the results of sequencing her own genome in the hopes of developing her own personalized preventive medicine strategies. She developed a mobile app that permits exporting of personalized sequencing data more easily. A series of small nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified by Melanie in her own genome relating to…
Roger Craig had a dream of being on Jeopardy, and he took a QS approach to making it happen. He downloaded all historical Jeopardy questions and answers into a database, clustering the questions by topic and keyword, and built a web tool around it to quiz himself. He visualized his answers to see where his…
This is the third post in the “Toolmaker Talks” series. The QS blog features many stories by those conducting personal QS projects that are about: what did they do? how did they do it? and what have they learned? In Toolmaker Talks we hear from those closely observing all this QS activity and developing appropriate…
Wako Takayama loves the smell of line-dried clothes. She also likes that it’s a way to conserve energy. In this video, Wako reflects on methods she developed to increase energy conservation after moving from an apartment to a home. Her personal experiences resulted in her becoming trained as an energy efficiency consultant and volunteering in…
After our amazing experience together last May at the first Quantified Self conference, some of the attendees who had come all the way from Holland asked for a European conference, so that some of the great contributors to the QS scene could participate more easily. Just six months later, that conference is happening. I’m amazed…
Quantified Selfers really love to gather face to face, sharing stories and experiments and tips. I’ve even had the humbling experience of people telling me that coming to a QS event changed their life. So how do we put together our events, to encourage this deep, collaborative learning? With our first European QS…
Boston QS organizer Michael Nagle gathers a panel of people in the social health space, and asks them: if not all behaviors can be incentivized, who are the users that succeed with your platform, and who are the users that fail? Dr. Joseph Kvedar of the Center for Connected Health, Rick Lee of Healthrageous, Jackie Thong…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Nov 6, 2011
Robert Carlsen, a recent graduate of Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, created a really neat little iPhone application called MobileLogger to better understand bicycle commuting behavior in New York City. Like many other activity tracking applications MobileLogger samples and stores data from the phone’s GPS and accelerometer. What makes MobileLogger unique is that the raw…
This is the second post in the “Toolmaker Talks” series. The QS blog features many stories by those conducting personal QS projects that are about: what did they do? how did they do it? and what have they learned? In Toolmaker Talks we hear from those closely observing all this QS activity and developing appropriate tools: what…
Gary Wolf shares “What we learned from starting Quantified Self” and starts off sharing a key journalistic secret – listen! He explains the biggest ‘surprise’ to come out of the QS experiment – face to face meetings are a key element in the collaborative knowledge making process. And in order to grow our family, let’s…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Oct 30, 2011
Inspired how powerful a connection he developed to the tracking of his runs, Chris Lukic has built a website to display data from a Nike sensor and put it in a social context. There are badges to reward users for various achievements, and something akin to a leaderboard for seeing how your runs compare to…
This is another post in our Lab Notes series to give you a sneak peek at how we work behind the scenes at Quantified Self Labs. “What’s your vision for Quantified Self?” and “Where will QS be in 10 years?” These are probably the two most common questions reporters ask us. I never know how…
Eri Gentry describes her presentation ‘Social Studies’ as “like Quantified Self, but Quantified Us!” She has always been wiling to be a participant in normal experiments; however, she now realizes that she wants her data to improve herself. Now she uses Genomera.com to run her own experiments that allow the participants to be actively involved…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Oct 23, 2011
-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…
