Tag: qstop

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Make Advanced Self-Measurement More Accessible by Bob Evans

March 1, 2016

Bob Evans is the lead developer of PACO, an open source tool for supporting individual discovery and large scale participatory research. What began as a personal project to gauge his work experience by randomly querying himself throughout the day, PACO has grown into a platform for experimentation used in over one thousand projects designed by researchers, companies, and individuals. In this talk from QSPH15, Bob discusses how the individual quest for self-discovery connects with large scale research.

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Ilyse Magy: Know Thy Cycle, Know Thyself

February 29, 2016

“My luteal phase went from 10 days to 16, which is a frickin’ Quantified Self miracle.” In this great talk, Ilyse Magy describes how tracking her menstrual cycle with the Fertility Awareness Method and Kindara worked for more than birth control. Tracking her cycle helped her understand how it affects her emotional state, and led her to find…

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The Patient Voice by Heidi Dohse

February 25, 2016

Heidi Dohse is “professional heart patient,” dedicated to bringing patient voices into the research environment as a member of the steering committee for the Health eHeart Alliance. In this talk from QSPH15, Heidi explains how the Health eHeart Alliance works as a valuable resource for humanizing the research process and tapping knowledge from the lived experience of patients to inform advances in healthcare.

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Participants at the Center by Michael Kellen

February 23, 2016

Michael Kellen is the Director of Technology at Sage Bionetworks, who was closely involved in the development of two of the apps that launched with Apple’s Research Kit: The Parkinson Disease mPower app and Share the Journey, a breast cancer survivors research app. In this talk from QSPH15, Michael explains what was involved in opening up a platform for large-scale research participation.

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Jon Cousins: Why I Weighed My Whiskers

February 23, 2016

Jon Cousins has given wonderful show&tell talks on mood tracking. Like most methods for measuring mood, his process involves a subjective assessment of his well being. But what if there was a physical measurement related to mood that doesn’t involve blood work? Inspired by an anecdote about a man’s beard growth while working on a…

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Explaining Nightscout by Lane Desborough

February 23, 2016

Today the New York Times published a fantastic story by Peter Andrey Smith about the Nightscout and OpenAPS projects: A Do-It-Yourself Revolution in Diabetes Care. People with diabetes and parents of kids with diabetes are self-tracking by necessity, and we’ve learned a lot from their talks about their projects at QS meetings and conferences. Their impact is…

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Have Faith in Ingenuity by Jose Gomez-Marquez

February 19, 2016

At the Little Device Lab at MIT, Jose Gomez-Marquez and his colleagues focus on bringing the ingenuity of the maker movement to the world of health and healthcare. In this talk from QSPH15, Jose uses specific examples from a new course at MIT to explain the idea of “transparent boxes” — systems and technologies that allow individuals to be creative in their exploration of themselves through data.

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Mark Wilson: Three Years of Logging my Inbox

February 17, 2016

“My inbox has become a barometer of my stress level.” Email overwhelm is something that most people of first world means can relate to. Getting a handle on this digital deluge is a Sisyphean endeavor that is, perhaps, only endured by deluding ourselves into thinking that it is possible if only we found the right…

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Who Asks the Questions by Dawn Nafus

February 17, 2016

Dawn Nafus, is an anthropologist at Intel Labs who has written with great clarity about the Quantified Self movement. In this talk from QSPH15, Dawn explores the concept of data access and literacy in terms of who gets to ask the questions that direct research.

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Bethany Soule: Extreme Productivity

February 12, 2016

“That’s insane! I want to try it.” Bethany Soule is the co-found of Beeminder, a commitment tool which she characterizes as “goal-tracking with teeth.” Her and Daniel Reeves, the other founder, have spoken on how they tracked the development of the tool and integrating it with other QS tools. In this talk from QS15, Bethany tells…

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Jacek Smolicki: Self-Tracking As Artistic Practice

February 11, 2016

“I don’t have a concrete goal. I don’t have a concrete aim to advance myself. It’s a way to explore different aspects of my life through data.” Since 2009 Jacek Smolicki has experimented with using personal data as a mode for artistic exploration. In this talk, he presents some of his practices: Making a collage…

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Building a Culture of Health by Stephen Downs

February 11, 2016

Stephen Downs, Chief Technology and Information Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, looks forward to the day when healthy choices are easy choices. That day may not be tomorrow, but identifying the early adopters, innovative thinkers, and technological disruptors can move us closer to that healthier world. In this talk from QSPH15, Stephen explains why the foundation decided to support the Quantified Self movement.

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Health Data Explorers by Kevin Patrick

February 9, 2016

Dr. Kevin Patrick is the director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at Calit2. At the 2015 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium, Kevin offered novel ways to think about the social utility of data.

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Robby Macdonell: The Data Is in, I am a Distracted Driver

February 4, 2016

“When I see someone driving towards me with their face buried in their phone, I get gloriously indignant about it.” Robby Macdonell has given great talks on transportation logging and time-tracking. Here, he combined those two data streams, using Automatic and RescueTime, to prove that he does not use his phone while driving nearly as…

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Scaling the QS Movement by Larry Smarr

February 3, 2016

Renowned physicist Larry Smarr is the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), who helped bring the power of computing to scientific research. In this talk from QSPH15, Larry reflects on consideration for scaling the QS movement and how the values encoded in tools created during the birth of new fields can influence future developments that affect hundreds of millions of people.

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Tuning My Brain With Music For Reading, Programming, and Archery by Rocio Chongtay

February 2, 2016

In this fascinating talk Rocio Chongtay shares her novel and thoughtfully designed experiments in using music to adjust her concentration and relaxation depending on what she’s doing. Using a consumer EEG device from Neurosky, Rocio tried different types of music while tracking the relaxation and concentration dimensions identified by the Neurosky algorithm. She had experience…