A few months ago I was fatigued and decided to try a more rigorous sleep hygiene routine to see if it would help (it did). To make the experiment fun I thought I’d look for a nifty iPhone app to track the data. After a fairly extensive search I noticed that most of the tools…
Let’s admit it. People who do stuff are more interesting than those who don’t. Naturally we’re biased as Self-Quantifiers, but don’t you love running into folks at gatherings who have surprises and results to share about themselves, gained from experimentation and tasty data? It’s stimulating to hear about an insight (“I eat less when I’m…
Everything has a dark side (Photo by Pixelicus) Can self-tracking hurt you? We mostly talk about the positive aspects of self-tracking here, but it’s worth venturing over to the dark side now and then. Take this comment from Stefan on a recent discussion post: “After spending some time playing around with the idea of what…
Our last discussion post was so popular that we’re doing it again. Today’s topic is: What metrics are you currently tracking about yourself? What do you measure daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly? You get bonus points if you share what tools you use to track your data or any insights you’ve learned. I’ll start off…
Nathan Yau over at Flowing Data started a fascinating discussion last week. He asked his readers why they collect data about themselves, what they’ve learned from it, or why they don’t collect any data at all. 23 people answered the call and shared their insights. There are many positive self-discovery comments like the stories we…
What happens when self-tracking and games are pervasive? Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design and instructor at Carnegie Mellon University, gave a shocking talk at the 2010 Dice Summit. With dark enthusiasm, he explored the question: if passive sensors become ubiquitous in the world around us, will everyday life turn into a…
A poem on the unseen struggles between self-tracking and self-worth.
Dan Meyer’s 2009 Annual Report from Dan Meyer on Vimeo. High school math teacher Dan Meyer put together this fast-paced, compelling look at his year in numbers. Thanks to David Rosenman of Mayo Clinic for sending this in!
The Winter issue of h+ Magazine is available for download now. It includes the article I wrote about self-tracking, with five Quantified Self show-and-tell projects profiled. The editors decided against my original title (Self-Tracking: The Next Generation), but I do think the Quantified Life is worth living. Don’t you?
Jeremy Johnson sent in this question for the illustrious QS Scientific Advisory Board, so we set about finding an answer for him. Gordon Bell and Seth Roberts responded with lightning speed! Jeremy’s question and their answers are below. If you have a question about your self-tracking that you’d like some help with, let me know….
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’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…
The US Department of Homeland Security has invented a Star Trek-like tricorder. Called the Standoff Patient Triage Tool (SPTT), it can measure pulse, body temperature, and respiration from up to 40 feet away. The obvious application is for emergency response teams, but why not have a tricorder stationed conveniently in your bedroom and office to…
What do we see in the mirror of our data? A couple of recent stories bring this question to mind. The first comes from Adam Bryant’s profile in the New York Times of Jim Collins, author of business advice books that have sold millions of copies. Collins is tremendously successful; a few hours of his…
A survey from Ian Li, a PhD student studying personal informatics at Carnegie Mellon University, asking for insight to guide his research project looking into the general challenges of personal informatics.
Politicians have always been self-trackers. In the flow of political action, you need a notebook just to keep track of people’s names. But when a recent political controversy was resolved by the notebooks of the most conscientious self-tracker in the history of the United States Senate, the reputation of people interested in personal data got…
Today we’re going to learn how to build your own multi-purpose mobile self-tracking application. The origin of this simple tracking method lies in the second QS Show&Tell when I outlined my dream self-tracking system and expressed a wish that somebody would build it. Among other things, I wanted an easy way to capture any kind…
Deep mysteries of human nature will be exposed by self-tracking, aspects of our behavior so disconcerting and bizarre that they will lead us to question whether we understand ourselves at all. I know this is true because such disconcerting results are already being produced at a rapid pace by experimental psychologists, and self-tracking brings the…
A common question people ask me is, “Why do you track yourself?” The primary answer, for anyone living with chronic pain, is simple — to help reduce the pain. Migraine, for example, is a chronic condition where self-tracking can have a positive effect. According to the National Headache Foundation, migraine affects 13% of the US…
“Self-tracker” appeared yesterday on Word Spy, the wonderful word-tracking site by Paul McFedries. McFedries does not track word usage quantitatively; his approach is to keep an eye out for neologisms, capturing them as they appear. It is done out of fascination. We’ve had our eye on medical and psychological aspects of self-tracking recently at QS,…
