Alastair Tse recently moved to New York, and wanted to walk all of the streets of Manhattan! He tried a few different approaches to tracking this that didn’t work, so he decided to make his own app that doesn’t use GPS or drain his phone battery. In the video below, Alastair talks about his adventures in…
Evan Savage has panic attacks, especially triggered by caffeine while driving. In late 2011, he was having multiple panic attacks a week. He didn’t want to take drugs, so he made his own recovery plan – logging his food, exercise, and panic attacks. He eliminated caffeine, and thought he had recovered, then relapsed. In the…
Gustavo Glusman is a member of Leroy Hood’s group at the Institute for Systems Biology. At a recent Hood group retreat, the main topic of conversation was Quantified Self! In the video below, Gustavo gives a fascinating recap of the retreat, including how the researchers talked about QS, what experiments they did on themselves, and…
Jana Beck was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 19 years old and has been interested in tracking her health ever since. Last year when she received a continuous blood glucose monitor she decided to take a more active role in understand what was effecting her blood glucose levels and insulin dosing. Spurred by reading…
Stefean Heeke wondered why only large companies were using “big data” and analytics, and then he decided to do something similar. In this talk Stefan describes a few different self-tracking and personal analytics projects that gave him unique insights into his own life. Not satisfied with only understanding and improving himself, he also applied his…
Lisa Betts-LaCroix has been tracking her weight off and on since 2000. In this Show & Tell talk at the recent Silicon Valley QS meetup Lisa details the trials and tribulations that go along with attempting to track her weight and other associated behavioral variables. From simple excel spreadsheets to using Google forms to finally…
Mike Winter does a lot of crazy research projects, including building an autonomous motorcycle. But when his daughter was in a bicycle accident a couple of years ago, he started thinking about bike safety. Specifically, he built a device with an Arduino CPU and a few sensors that attaches to your bike and connects with your…
Jeremy Howard has been studying Chinese for the last two years. The method he uses is called spaced repetitive learning, found in SuperMemo and Anki, in which you prompt yourself to remember something just before you’re about to forget it. Jeremy wrote his own software to track his learning, including variables such as time of day, what…
Sky Christopherson is a velodrome cyclist who has been on the U.S. Olympic team. After retiring, he lived in the world of startups, and when his health started to decline as a result of that stress, he turned back to the kind of quantification he had been doing as an athlete to restore his health. In…
Last December, Stan James started to wonder how much of every day he spent staring at glowing rectangles, and how he was spending that time. He set up his webcam to take a picture of himself every hour, as well as a screenshot of what he’s working on. In the video below, Stan talks about…
Sarah Lewington and Michelle Hughes study and teach fashion communication at Nottingham Trent University. In the 5-minute Ignite talk below, they talk about designing with empathy for a project they’re doing with Unilever, with more questions than answers, such as: what is the relative importance of data and functionality vs. emotional attachment to a device?…
Hugo Campos lives with arrhythmia, and is a self-professed data nudist. He decided to do an experiment last December to improve his health and his heart – going vegan and taking beautiful pictures of every single meal he ate to post to a public Flickr set. In the video below, Hugo gives an animated talk about…
Gareth MacLeod is a developer/entrepreneur interested in making QS techniques easy to incorporate into daily life. He built an app that sends him text messages to ask about his sleep, mood, romantic encounters, tooth brushing, etc. He then looks for correlations among the different data streams, and even spent 100 hours building a correlation heat…
In this talk, Beau Gunderson shares a way to bring all of your disparate data sets, from Facebook to Twitter to Foursquare to Zeo to Fitbit to Runkeeper, together in one collection to be accessed through simple APIs. It’s part of an open source development effort called The Locker Project. The hope is to be able to…
Denisa Kera is a professor, philosopher and designer interested in DNA and food data. She asks, what happens when people share data in social situations? She organizes DNA Dinners at a local hackerspace to experiment with this question. In the video below, Denisa talks about how she turned her genetic data into a bruschetta dish,…
James Stout is a professional cyclist. He also has Type 1 Diabetes. In this Show & Tell, James explains how self-tracking has empowered him to understand himself and be a role model for others. Truly inspiring. (Filmed by the San Diego QS Show&Tell meetup group.) QS San Diego: James Stout – Diabetes, Exercise, and Quantified Self from Ernesto…
Chloe Fan has kept all of her movie ticket stubs since 2001. Inspired by a minimalism streak, she digitized them all and created some cool visualizations. She learned her movie-watching patterns: by day of week, time of day, IMDB movie rating, price, location, who she was with, etc. In the video below, Chloe walks through…
Richard Ryan was inspired by the first QS conference to spend a year hacking his life. He most wanted to solve his problems with insomnia, obesity, Ambien dependence, hypertension, and drinking alcohol – what he calls “classic New Yorker problems.” In the video below, Richard talks about the changes he made to his lifestyle, rules…
Jakob Larsen and his team at the Mobile Informatics Lab at the Technical University of Denmark have developed a way to build a real-time 3-D model of your brain using a smartphone and the Emotiv EPOC game controller headset. In the Ignite talk below, Jakob describes how the fourteen sensors in this mobile EEG device rival…
Simon Frid moved to California last year because his data told him he was smarter here than in New York. Well, not really. But this funny story begins his journey of figuring out how to track one of the simplest things that we don’t generally know about ourselves: our own posture. Simon designed a wearable…
