Jules Goldberg is a snorer, and estimates that he has spent 1/8th of his life snoring. The noise was bothering his wife, so he built an app called SnoreLab to quantify his snoring (mild, loud, or epic?) and help him reduce it. In the video below, Jules shares how he identified where his snoring was coming…
Brooks Kincaid has been tracking his blood glucose continuously for the past two years, after 16 years of finger pricking and guessing. In this video, Brooks openly shares what he has learned about the benefits and challenges of continuous blood glucose monitoring and explains his preferred data view, the modal day snapshot.
Twelve years ago, Buster Benson started tracking how different web links affected his mood (the Morale-O-Meter!), and he was surprised to find that other people were interested in his data. In this inspiring video, Buster shares some snapshots of what he has tracked over the past several years, including his famous 8:36 pm project and how…
Stuart Calimport is on a quest to find the most useful memes for health and well-being. He started the Human Memome Project, and spent a year and a half collecting all his ideas about health. He classified 5137 of these ideas as healthy/ethical/optimal and 6581 of them as unhealth/unethical/sub-optimal. In the video below, Stuart shares some…
At a recent QS meetup in Boston, Gary shares a few quick insights on the challenges of restarting a tracking practice once you’ve stopped, gamification vs. motivation, and his experience of meditation. Check out the video below, as well as a more detailed discussion about his meditation practice. Gary Wolf – Boston QS Q&A –…
Ryan Hagen is a doctoral student in clinical psychology who’s terrified of people getting therapy through Siri. That said, for his PhD project he was inspired to extend the work of Sandy Pentland and ginger.io correlating people’s passive smartphone behavior data with anxiety and depression. In the video below, Ryan explains his current three-month study, which you can…
Carl Valle, track and field coach to elite athletes, believes that the three categories of things to measure for optimal health are activity, biochemistry, and cardiology. In the video below, he walks through his favorite tips for each of these. (Filmed by the Boston QS Show&Tell meetup group.) Carl Valle – Immortality: 3 Key Metrics from James…
Ryota Kanai does brain scans for a living. He can assess a person’s intelligence level, personality traits, and social proclivity from these scans. He even did a study correlating number of friends on Facebook with brain structure. In the video below, Ryota shows a 3-D scan of his brain, highlighted with colors to show where he…
Cristian Monterroza felt like his life was slipping in a direction that he didn’t like, and was inspired to start tracking by the amazing lifelogging project of artist On Kawara. Cristian started out using several different apps, then created his own app to passively record his daily activities, called wrkstrm. In the video below, Cristian shares the insights…
Catherine Kerr does brain science related to mindfulness at Brown University Medical School. She points out that mindfulness traditions ask practitioners to simply focus closely on body sensations in order to bring attention to the present moment. Why does this help with depression? In the video below, Catherine explains some of her magnetoencephalopathy (MEG) research to…
Matt Dobson is working on automatic affect recognition, which basically means quantifying emotions beyond self-reporting. In the video below, Matt walks through the current technologies available to passively detect emotions, helpfully explaining things like galvanic skin response, heart rate variability, and speech tone. He also gives some hints as to where the future of emotion tracking…
Sharla Sava decided to take a daily picture of herself for a year, without missing a day. She was inspired by this Flickr self-portrait group. While it was a surprisingly grueling commitment, Sharla learned that self-portraits can be an outlet for public dialog, a powerful mirror, and a creative way to explore the expression of different states…
The QS London meeting in October (#13) was full of interesting speakers and they’re now available in video form. You can find them all on the London Channel at: London QS Channel The October talks include (in the order presented): Conference Roundup (Adriana Lukas). An Overview for Londoners of the QS Annual Conference. SnoreLab (Jules Goldberg)….
Steven Jonas discovered through an EEG assessment that he had a strong “freeze” response to stressful situations. This inspired him to use his emWave to monitor his stress levels, hack it to alert him whenever he got too stressed, and change his patterns at work. Check out Steven’s open, inspiring story in the video below, filmed at Quantified…
Leigh Honeywell has always had trouble getting herself to go to bed, so she started tracking her sleep to make sure she was getting enough rest. In the video below, filmed at Quantified Self Seattle, Leigh talks about the different ways she measured sleep, how she caught up on her sleep debt, and what she…
At the last San Francisco QS meetup group event, Justin Fu shared the story of how he lost 40 pounds in 15 weeks using the Fitbit, how tracking affected his relationships, and how he developed a slew of new habits. Check out his inspiring story in the video below. Justin Fu – 15 Weeks of Self Tracking…
At the inaugural show&tell of the San Francisco QS meetup group, Kevin Kelly gave a perspective-broadening talk on where Quantified Self came from and where it’s going. Check it out below! Kevin Kelly – Quantified Self Co-Founder from Gary Wolf on Vimeo.
Ian Clements has been self-tracking since 1974 – mostly exercise, weight, and general health indicators. But in 2007 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. This set off a more comprehensive mission of self-tracking to figure out which lifestyle changes and supplements were helping him to live longer. In the video below, Ian walks through his…
Nir Eyal – Knowing Your Behaviour Type from Gary Wolf on Vimeo. Nir Eyal writes about “behavior engineering” encompassing user experience design, behavioral economics, and a dash of neuroscience. In this Show & Tell talk at the May 3, 2012 Silicon Valley QS meetup, Nir offers suggestions for behavior change design based on understanding the distinction between…
Nick Winter has done some dedicated testing of the effect of different interventions on his cognitive function. He discovered that butter had an unexpected impact on his mental performance, while things like cutting out gluten had no effect. In the video below, Nick gives an entertaining and informative talk about his experimental design and what he…
