Nicholas Manolakos is a programmer and avid reader who has been self-tracking for twenty years. He’s recently been improving his left-right body balance, and can write proficiently with both hands now. In the video below, he talks about many of his experiments, including optimizing cognitive performance, managing anxiety, introducing complexity, dietary experiments and fasting –…
Dr. Mark Drangsholt is a long-time self-tracker who also teaches evidence-based medicine at the University of Washington. He has tracked blood pressure and exercise, atrial fibrillation and what triggers it, deep sleep and sex, diet and body fat. In the video below, Mark shares what he learned about his arrhythmia triggers, and how his self-tracking data…
James Norris asks the Singapore QS audience, “Do you remember your first kiss?” In the 16 years since his first kiss at age 13, James calculated that he has had 1,500 “firsts.” For the past three years, he has been tracking his goals, according to how happy, fulfilled, and productive he feels every day. In…
Bill Schuller started tracking his exercise and weight in 2010, and got into the habit of talking about his numbers each night at the dinner table. Before long, his kids got interested in tracking too. In the video below, Bill talks about what he learned and tells some fun stories, including one about a tracking…
Randy Sargent has an hypothesis that eating certain foods, like tomatoes, makes him irritable and anxious. He asked himself, “How can I structure an experiment on myself so that I don’t know whether I’m eating tomatoes or not?” and “How would I go about quantifying my irritability?” In the video below, he explores ways to…
Ulrich Atz was curious about measuring his stress levels. He chose three methods to do this: experience sampling, day reconstruction method, and heart rate. In the video below, he helpfully describes how he went about designing his experiment, how the different methods work and the challenges of each one, and what he learned. He was…
Alex Grey is developing a better kind of muscle sensor, to help people see their muscle activity patterns and change behaviors like typing or running to be more effective and less painful. The sensors are wireless, stick to your skin, and can measure different kinds of muscle activity including arm/leg (EMG) and heart muscles (ECG)….
Ben Ahrens got his start in self-tracking as a personal trainer for six years. He was then diagnosed with Lyme disease and spent two years in bed. In the video below, he talks about his tracking failures, the importance of intuition and simplicity, and what he learned about controlling his symptoms by tweaking his mental state. A…
Kiel Gilleade researches physiological computing. He streams his heart rate data to Twitter, live, 24 hours a day. Over the course of a year, he learned how his heart rate responded to different events, dietary intake, and changes in routine. He was also surprised to learn that he didn’t get up until 8 am! His friends and…
Robby MacDonell from RescueTime tried many different tools to form habits, and didn’t find that any of them worked. After a good deal of frustration, he started to investigate the idea of having goals at all. In this great talk, Robby honestly shows data that isn’t pretty – hooray! He also shares some really interesting insights…
David Philips is a professor at the University of Toronto who studies surveillance. He’s interested in democratizing infrastructures of surveillance and using surveillance data for things other than population control, such as creating senses of self and community. In the video below, he gives an interesting talk about what he has learned about the why…
Nick Winter was inspired by Seth Roberts to track his productivity. He uses the method of percentile feedback, which compares his current productivity to past productivity as he goes about the hours of his days. Nick uses it to help prioritize his work projects, and he gives a short talk about his experience below. (Filmed by…
Matt Velderman wanted to figure out his acne problem. He dove into researching acne treatments, tracking himself and modifying his diet and behavior. His approach was to try every possible thing that could help at once to solve the problem quickly, and then remove one thing at a time to figure out a minimal set…
Hind Hobeika is a swimmer and an engineer from Beirut. She wanted to monitor her heart rate while she was swimming, so she built goggles that sense and display her heart rate in real time. It’s called the Butterfleye Project. In this great talk below, she describes how she designed and assembled the goggles, the…
Andy Leigh wanted to row around the world from his bedroom. Why? To lose weight and to do some kind of project with the open source hardware Arduino. He chose rowing because it’s a low-impact activity that he can do with his injury. But manual tracking in a spreadsheet was too cumbersome. In the video…
This is the first time we’ve had video of a new meetup’s very first gathering! Ciaran Lyons started QS Singapore, and recorded his introductory remarks as well as his own self-tracking story. Great to watch for people new to QS or thinking of starting a meetup group. Thanks Ciaran!
On February 7th, 2012 there was an amazing “meeting of the minds” at CALIT2 down in San Diego, CA. The local San Diego Quantified Self meetup group working in collaboration with CALIT2, the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, and the West Wireless Health Institute brought together Gary Wolf (Quantified Self founder), Larry Smarr…
Sacha Chua started tracking time to find out where she was spending time and how she might change her patterns. In the video below, she explains what she learned, including how quickly her interests change, how she chooses to break down her time, and how the tracking helps her focus. Be sure to check out…
In 2006, PhD student Ian Li created Moodjam to let people track their moods in color. At the QS Europe conference last November, he met artist Laurie Frick, who creates beautiful works of art from her data. She mentioned that she was using Moodjam, and this inspired Ian to make a new version of it! In the video…
We’re excited to announce that the videos from the Quantified Self Europe conference in Amsterdam are starting to come online! I’ll be posting them individually here on the blog, but if you can’t wait for that, you can find some of them here on Vimeo. Also, QS Amsterdam member Kees Plattel put together this beautiful…
