Do you need help with your self-tracking data analysis? Is there a specific problem or burning question about your experiment design that you’d love some guidance on? Gary and I are proposing an idea to help – read on for details! We’ve gathered an amazing Quantified Self Scientific Advisory Board to be part of our…
We will have our 9th Quantified Self Bay Area Meet Up this week on Wednesday, October 14, 2009. It will be held in Stanford University at the Wallenberg Learning Center (below). As in the past, this is a user-generated evening of presentations by folks who are self-tracking in one form or another. Each presenter gets…
Gilles Chatellier, ‘Feasibility Study of N-of-1 Trials With Blood Pressure Self-MonitoringHypertension, 25 (2): 294 – Hypertension I measure blood pressure at home. Unfortunately, it is easy to become bored with this procedure, and neglect it. In fact, it is more fun to wonder why measuring blood pressure is so boring than actually measuring blood pressure,…
I recently came across Mikael Huss’ Follow the Data blog, which reports on data-driven trends in reality mining, self-tracking, and personalized medicine. In a recent post, Mikael talks about three bits of self-tracking news that are sure to create tingles up the spines of Quantified Self readers: 1. FitBit shipsAt long last! FitBit, the accelerometer…
The Mayo Clinic held their Transforming Healthcare Symposium last week in Rochester, MN. On display were the latest innovations they are brewing up in their SPARC Innovation Lab, like real-time, on-screen specialist consultation when you go to visit your primary care doctor. A stellar lineup of speakers from Intel’s Craig Barrett to IDEO’s Tim Brown…
At this week’s Bay Area QS Show&Tell we had a packed house at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. The recap below is powered by Mark Carranza’s incredible memory experiment, described in the last post. I’ve used Mark’s work to refresh my own memory so that I could describe what happened last week…
Mark Carranza has been keeping a list of his ideas since 1984. His list has more than a million entries, with more than 7 million connections between entries. Although the media window above appears to contain a video of Mark’s talk at QS #3, Mark preferred that MX not be shown yet, so what you…
Complete notes and reference links from Monday night’s terrific QS Show&Tell will be up later in the week, with an assist from Mark Carranza’s amazing idea archive. In the meantime, Steve Brown has shared the slides from his rapid-fire talk about 3banana. Steve had the misfortune of going last during an incredible, crowded meeting, and…
At the last QS Show&Tell, long time QS participant Paul Sas made an important critical comment about self-tracking. He said that he noticed a lot of “write once/read never” projects. Data collection: is it an end in itself? Or do you want to do something useful and interesting with your data? This is the theme…
For us self-trackers, data can pile up faster than we know what to do with it. Deriving meaning from the numbers we collect is a challenge I hear over and over at every Quantified Self gathering. Here’s a secret: visualizing your data is a powerful tool for discovering the treasured meaning you seek. The classic…
At last night’s NYC QS Show&Tell we gathered in the very cool tech floor of the Tisch ITP program at NYU. Thanks to Dan O’Sullivan and the rest of the faculty and staff for hosting us. We had all the best equipment you could ask for. What we didn’t have was a very good camera…
Scott Harden, of The Blogging Rotagonist, has created a cheap, functional DIY ECG machine that you can build at home for $1 worth of parts. He has circuit diagrams, various plots of his data, and the Python code he used for his project in this detailed blog post, along with videos like the one below….
Thoughts on treating access to personal data in the same way as network permissions – as a system that permits a customizable range of options from full, real-time access to complete denial.
I’ve been meaning to write something about Track Your Happiness, a project of Matt Killingsworth at Harvard University. A couple of weeks ago Buster McLeod, an interesting self-tracker whose writing I enjoy, reviewed his experience with Track Your Happiness. He was pleased. Track Your Happiness Is Awesome Track Your Happiness is a project begun as…
Mans Shapshak has been watching a lot of tennis lately and it inspired him to get out on the court again after not playing much since college. He found his serve had deteriorated, especially his toss. So he searched the internet for tips and found advice like this: “A high, confident toss made 1 to…
You “own” your own health data. That is clear if you generate it yourself, as self-trackers do. But even when others generate health data for you, you should have full access and “ownership” of it. They are only “borrowing” the data. But not every health care provider makes it easy to get cheap access to…
In this inspiring talk from the recent New York City QS Show&Tell Hulda Emilsdottir and Josh Klein talk about the system Hulda developed to analyze their relationship to their possessions, and then about another system Hulda made for buying clothes based on seasonal usefulness, care-requirements, and compatibility with her other clothes. [For info about the…
In this video from the recent QS Show&Tell David Reeves of Limeade describes the challenges of providing a universal self-tracking system in the context of an employee wellness program. The Q&A covers a lot of great territory, including how to make self-tracking rewarding, how to encourage participation, analysis techniques, and privacy issues.
Thanks to Chris Finlay, the Quantified Self now has a nascent social network on Ning. You can find us here: The Quantified Self on Ning Chris and I were talking about the ideal design and features for this social network, and as I was staring at the blank google doc we created for our outline…
I’ve long been interested in medical self-care. The idea of patients taking responsibility of their own health and healing seems to me to be essential in the long run. Quantified Self was started in part to collect a certain kind of tool that (among other reasons) might give you data which could be used to…
