Four new Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup groups have started up in the past few weeks, so we want to give them a warm welcome here! Dublin, Ireland – started by Mark Matthews and Ronan McDonnell Raleigh, North Carolina – started by George Saines Lousiville, Kentucky – started by Chris Hall and Joe Wheeler South Florida…
I started getting headaches as a teenager, and migraines when my first daughter was born 9 years ago. I’m 34 now, so that’s about 20 years of some kind of regular head pain, and who knows how many ibuprofen pills popped. When I started seriously self-quantifying a couple of years ago, pain was high on…
Mike Schoeffler from Roadbud talks about the effect of noisy data on self-quantifying. A popular GPS running app had been giving him trouble – magically teleporting him and missing parts of his runs. He found it frustrating enough that he built his own app. Watch the video below to see the interesting discussion with the audience…
Ted Punt talks about a device developed by TNO (Dutch Institute for Applied Science) to measure vital signs from people at a distance of up to 10 meters. Heart rate, body motion, and respiration are measured continuously and wirelessly with this device, which should be on the market within a year. He goes into some…
Bryan Bishop tracks every social interaction he has with anyone, in person, on the phone, and online – and he’s been doing this since 2005. He discovered that he talks 60% of the time, and mostly interacts with people online. Also, the more people he talks to, the more lines of code he writes! Bryan…
Can you quantify love? Gary Krane wants to help couples have happier, stronger relationships. He is starting CoupleSpace as a lightweight version of couples therapy, for the noble goal of creating more love in the world. He has identified 26 needs for long, happy relationships, which are quantified as you use the app. CoupleSpace is…
Victor van Doorn describes himself as a nostalgic workaholic. He has tried and failed to keep diaries, so he decided to build an automatic one. His iPhone app Replay My Day (@replaymyday) collects his location and online activities each day, and builds it into a film – so when he’s lying in bed at night…
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…
It’s an exciting day, brought to you by a team of dedicated QS’ers. We are hereby announcing the first Quantified Self Europe Conference, to be held November 26-27, 2011, in Amsterdam. Our first conference this past May in Mountain View was a success by however you’d like to measure it – people said it was…
Cedric Yau trains in kung fu 12 hours a week. He wanted to track his his activity and energy levels, so he created a text-messaging service called Well+Tuner, where he also records notes for how he feels on different days. He learned how to time his food intake and 50 daily supplements for maximum energy,…
This is one of the findings in the amazing Susannah Fox‘s recent report for Pew Internet, part of the Pew Research Center. The report is called The Social Life of Health Information, and has several interesting findings. Here is an excerpt: Carol Torgan, a health science strategist, points out that anyone who makes note of…
Joost Plattel quantifies 67% of his life. His dataset from 2010 has 40,000 data points. One way he tried to make sense of all this data was by building a heatmap of his public transportation data. He plans to build it out by integrating Foursquare, Twitter, Google latitude, and iPhone location data to get a…
This is a first for us. At our Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup this week (slides available here), we had so many wonderful folks donate and buy QS t-shirts that we decided to use the money to fund an exciting project on Kickstarter. It’s an open hardware project called Pulse Sensor, by Yury Gitman and…
In March I discovered that looking at a graph of my productivity (for the current day, with a percentile attached) was a big help. My “efficiency” — the time spent working that day divided by the time available to work — jumped as soon as the new feedback started (as this graph shows). The percentile score,…
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,…
Ernesto Ramirez has world-changing dreams but a grad student budget. He built his own walking desk, which recently helped inspire me to start standing to do my work, and he has also figured out how to do QS on the cheap, using free web tools. In the video below, he describes his favorite tools, including…
This post and instructions are no longer up to date. For a current how-to please visit the updated post. On February 11th FitBit released their API into the wild and let developers get to work. Since then there have been some very neat integrations. One of the best uses of the API it the open…
Recently, Technology Review invited me to do a guest post on one of their blogs as part of their feature, “The Measured Life.” I chose to engage a claim I saw on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog — that at the QS Conference, it seemed that “quantified self” = “quantified health.” He asked about mood, attention, emotions —…
Sandy Santra gives a short, passionate talk below on turning Quantified Self data into knowledge. He tracks his migraines, time alone, happiness, meltdowns, panic attacks, and “zombification.” (I’d like to see a follow-up talk on that last one!) He gave the audience a framework for how to turn their own data into knowledge, for human…
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…
