In the last session of the day, we had a few experimental talks on noticing how food changes physical condition. It was also an interesting series of talks that shows the importance of collecting our own subjective data to back up or refute the other technological data that we might also have access to. I…
A colleague I’ll call John has decided to start tracking his mood for a long period of time (years). He explains why: A few years ago, after a severe manic attack, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The attack was preceded by an intense period of stress, then two weeks of elevated mood, increased social…
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…
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…
I recently received an email from someone having trouble keeping up with her experiment. While there is lots of general advice about discipline and motivation, this got me thinking about how doing personal experiments might differ. Following are a few brief thoughts, but I’d love to hear ways that you keep motivated in your quantified…
With all the disparate data streams coming out of Quantified Self tools, Stephanie Gerson saw a need to create a tool to bring them all together. In the video below, she presents her project Trackify, a new way for people to find correlations and trends in their data streams. Stephanie also puts out a call for…
We see a lot of cool things here that people are experimenting with, such as health (sleep, water intake, mood) or productivity (interruptions, hours/day, attention), but we are also trying odder things. My interest is in widening the definition of what could be considered an experiment, so I thought I’d ask, what off-the-wall things have…
This is a guest post by Chloe Fan: — Hi! I’m a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon in Human-Computer Interaction, and I’m interested in learning about the barriers that you may encounter while collecting or reflecting on your personal information (e.g., too tedious to collect, information not useful, forgetting to collect). I’m also interested in learning…
This is a guest post from MIT’s Ian Eslick, including his discussion-provoking video from the most recent Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup. Thanks Ian! — Tracking my lifestyle changes and related symptoms on an ongoing basis has proved to be challenging. The severity of my symptoms have never been such that I’ve made detailed note-taking a…
Considerations for the future of big data in self-tracking and personal informatics.
A guest post from futurist Walter de Brouwer on his suggestions for the ‘periodic table’ of tracking gadgets still to be invented.
A post debunking some of the misconceptions around the practice of self-tracking.
One of the most common questions I get from people is, “do you have a list of all Quantified Self tools, or resources in a particular area, like heart rate variability or cognitive function?” We’ve been cobbling together a preliminary list of self-tracking resources over the past few months, but we are now very excited to…
Here’s a video clip on health tracking from RedeTV!, one of Brazil’s biggest TV stations. Steven Dean, organizer of the New York QS Show&Tell meetup group, gives a great overview of some tools he uses to track his health, and a Brazilian doctor weighs in with his perspective on the benefit to patients. It’s in…
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…
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…
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…
A reader over at my blog shared the NYT article Wandering Mind Is a Sign of Unhappiness, which reports on research by Killingsworth and Gilbert showing some surprises about distractedness. (My take: First, the least surprising result may be that the world’s happiest activity is reproduction. Second, almost half of the time we are not…
When was the last time you stepped back and gave yourself credit for your data-driven work? In our busy lives it is easy to forget to celebrate our accomplishments. It’s especially true when what we’re doing is heavy, like working with a medical ailment or a relationship problem. Fortunately, treating life as an experiment –…
Identifying patterns is crucial in experimentation because patterns can indicate useful correlations. After all, the whole point of experimenting on ourselves and collecting data is to find ways to make changes that help us to be happier, and patterns tell us where there are points of leverage. Patterns should make us curious, and we should…
