After hitting the wall midway through a marathon, Thomas Blomseth Christiansen turned to instrumentation. Along with coding his own negative split plan generator, his project evolved to include an olympic swimming coach, many new devices, a metronome – and ultimately mastery of the art of pacing.
Mark Moschel shares his experience with the ketogenic diet, including his insights into the correlation between perceived energy levels to blood ketone levels, the inverse relationship between ketones and glucose, and the ceiling effect of too-high ketones.
A Show&Tell talk presented by Kyrill Potapov discussing the idea of digital family heirlooms and ways of emotionally engaging with productivity data through representations in physical space.
It rains a lot in Portland, Oregon. And if you’re 8 years old like Cantor, recess gets cancelled a lot. But unlike most 8-year-olds, Cantor is doing something about that. By tracking his steps, he’s able to show that every cancelled recess takes about 600 steps out of his day. Compared to his average of…
It’s hard for me to like an album the first time I listen to it. I can almost feel some part of my brain reject the music, even from bands I like, because it’s not familiar. However, after a few listens, the album will grow on me and I’ll find myself humming melodies that I…
While it is clear that exercise is beneficial, how does one decide what to do to get and stay fit? When Laila Zemrani surveyed people at the gym, she found that a majority don’t decide at all. Sixty percent didn’t know why they were doing a particular exercise. And of those, 50% admitted to merely…
Stefano Schiavon is an assistant professor and researcher interested in sustainable building design. As he told us at last month’s Quantified Self meetup in Berkeley, California, “I am Italian. I love architecture. And I think buildings are beautiful.” One goal of building design is to increase individual comfort. However, this poses a problem. Everyone is…
Ahnjili Zhuparris shares her experiment examining the menstrual cycle’s influence on her day-to-day behaviour by using browser plugins to track variations in her interactions with different websites. She discovered interesting changes across several platforms, including how she browsed Facebook, swiped in Tinder, and listened to music on YouTube.
In this talk, Randy Sargent shows how he used a spectrogram, a tool mostly used for audio, to better understand his own biometric data. A spectrogram was preferable to a line graph for its ability to visualize a large number of data points. As Randy points out, an eeg sensor can produce 100 million data…
In this talk, Richard Sprague shares his attempt to improve his sleep quality by increasing the amount of bifidobacterium in his gut through eating potato starch. You’ll learn why he took the extreme step of flushing his digestive tract and rebuilding it from scratch.
Ellis Bartholomeus has many of the standard self-tracking tools like pedometers, heart rate monitors, and eeg sensors. But she explored a different type of tool when a friend gave her a logbook with a place to record her daily mood by drawing a smiley or frowny face on a colored circle. Although it initially felt like…
Peter Torelli had $2000 saved when he entered college. He knew that it wouldn’t last long, so he had to be careful about his spending. He switched to using a credit card in order to have a record of his purchases and reconciled his accounts every month. It became a habit that he kept for…
Abe had an issue with staying up too late. The early morning hours often found him on his couch, working on his laptop. The problem is that he simply lost track of time. To help make his bedtime unforgettable, Abe built a reminder he could not ignore. He wrote a simple app that uses colors to…
Mark Leavitt has a unique perspective in that he is both an engineer and a physician. In his retirement, he is applying his wealth of knowledge to keeping himself healthy. In this talk, Mark looks at how heart rate variability relates to his willpower.
Like many, Akhsar Kharebov found healthy weight loss to be an emotionally difficult process, but the Withings smart scale led to a breakthrough for him. In this talk he discusses how data helped him gain the self control to overcome temptations.
When someone comes into your life and takes up a special place in your heart, do they also occupy a similar place in your data? Shelly used GMvault to look through 5 years of Google Chat logs to “hunt for signals that I loved my husband and not somebody else.”
In this talk from QS15, Steven Cartwright, associate director at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, shows how seventeen years of location tracking has given him a wealth of data to explore in the form of three-dimensional data visualization sculptures.
Paul LaFontaine, organizer for the Denver QS meetup, shares his experience tracking heart rate variability (HRV) to understand “vapor lock,” his term for the inability to recall information that can occur during a stressful conversation. His analysis revealed a likely cause for this “lock up,” but the unexpected results led him to change his approach to meetings and conversations at work.
“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…
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…
