I’m starting to wonder – is there any aspect of life that cannot be tracked? This week’s roundup on lifestyle-tracking tools moves into deeply personal areas like sex life, baby’s sleep schedule, amount of drinking, menstrual cycles, meditation, and media consumption. Proceed with caution if you are squeamish. It’s part of our regular tool roundup for the…
This is a guest post by Sastry Nanduri, co-founder of one of our annual sponsors, HealthTap. Please comment below if you’d like to be part of the “personal data hackathon” Sastry is suggesting: — HealthTap is an avid supporter and sponsor of Quantified Self. We share Quantified Self’s belief that quantification and measurement can lead to insightful…
A touchy-feely post this week, I’d love to hear your suggestions on meaningful things we might track during the holidays, now or whenever they are celebrated. Here are a few ideas I had in the social and health categories. What are yours? # social events participated in # laughs # times you stopped and took…
Eric Boyd, a long-time QS member and now part of the Toronto QS Show&Tell meetup group, has a new project. It’s called HeartSpark, and it’s a heart-shaped pendant which flashes little LED lights in time with your heart beat. HeartSpark and Eric (video below) were featured on Engadget today – congrats! Thanks to @faisal_q for…
From the Amsterdam QS Show&Tell group: Matt Cottam talks about many of the cool personal informatics and biosensing projects designed by his company, Tellart. Some prototype projects include creative ways to encourage people to take breaks at work, remote teddy bears to connect the elderly with their families, a breath alcohol sensor for the iPhone,…
As I get to know the QS community and the wider life-as-experiment one, I’ve noticed something troubling. In some areas there seems to be more men participating in our work than women. In this post I’ll try to identify the problem, suggest a couple of causes, and then get your feedback on what you think…
In advance of our next Bay Area Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup, which will have a Health and Medicine theme, this roundup post is on health- and medicine-related self-tracking tools. Blood pressure, genetics, medical test results, blood sugar readings, hormone levels, dietary experiments – if you have a self-tracking project, gadget, or app, we want to…
First video ever from the Boston QS Show&Tell group: Trapper Markelz of MeYouHealth is introduced by QS organizer Michael Nagle. MeYouHealth is trying to solve the behavior change problem and especially influence women, who tend to make health decisions for their families. Watch the video below to hear Trapper’s tips on how to bring quantifying…
While much of our work here is focused on individual development, there are plenty of circumstances in our professional lives where we can apply the ideas of experimentation. Let me set the stage with some background and ideas, and then I’d love to hear from you on how you widen self-tracking to apply to your…
I’ve been thinking for some time about the connection between self-tracking and mindfulness. At first glance they seem to be very different – picture the wired-up gadget wizard sitting next to the unadorned meditating guru. But step to the side and look from a different angle, and you may see meditation and self-tracking as two…
From the New York QS Show&Tell meetup group – Colin Schiller talks about how his productivity changed after having a baby. He experimented with using the Pomodoro Technique and only working eight hours a day. For four weeks, he tracked all the work activities he did in each 25-minute work segment. Watch the video below…
I’ve been wondering if there is a small set of categories encompassing the ways we interact with the world to get useful data. Following are some that came to me, which I’d love your thoughts on. Note that all these offer creative opportunities for things to measure based on the consequences of the type of…
From the Bay Area QS Show&Tell group: Dirk Aguilar shows charts of his energy consumption – electricity, gas, driving, and flying. He annotated his graphs with trips and life changes, and was surprised to learn that while his gas usage dropped during periods of travel, his electricity usage remained high from all of his appliances passively…
Lifelogging – the continuous capture of a large part of one’s life. Some people use paper journals, others sport wearable cameras, post status updates, or tap numbers into their smart phones. If you record your life or make tools to record lives, read on! This post is part of our regular tool roundup for the…
From the London QS Show&Tell group: Jon Cousins talks about the development of Moodscope, a social site where users can track their mood and share their stats with friends. He battled depression secretly for 30 years, and was inspired to invent his own mood-tracking system after a potential bipolar disorder diagnosis. Watch the video below…
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Fat-rich Thanksgiving preparations have got me thinking an awful lot about my first citizen science study, Butter Mind, in which participants ate half a stick of butter, the equivalent in coconut oil, or nothing, and then performed a simple math test. Butter Mind ran from October 23rd to November 12th. Unfortunately, we were unable to determine…
The contents of this blog will be transferred to a different server over the next few days. Hopefully readers won’t witness any disruption in access but there always seem to be a hiccup or two in these migrations. Careful readers may notice a slight change in appearance once the blog arrives on its new server….
In this review, I will discuss electricity monitors. Instead of describing the devices one-by-one, I looked at the features of a bunch of these devices using the considerations I wrote about in this article and grouped them into two groups: real-time and long-term. Electricity monitors that belong to the real-time group show users their electricity…
From the Amsterdam QS Show&Tell group: Martijn Aslander talks about his PersonalStats.nl project to track all of his personal data. He records everything from travel to the 5 best and worst things he does each day to how many people he addresses at his lectures. He meets 100-200 people every week, and was interested to learn…
