An excited, sold-out crowd is gathered in Amsterdam today for our first Quantified Self Europe conference. You can follow along on Twitter with the hashtags #qs2011 and #qseurope. To give a bit of background for our Dutch readers, here is a video of Martijn Aslander, one of the QS Europe organizers, at a recent talk…
Melanie Swan of DIY Genomics describes the results of sequencing her own genome in the hopes of developing her own personalized preventive medicine strategies. She developed a mobile app that permits exporting of personalized sequencing data more easily. A series of small nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were identified by Melanie in her own genome relating to…
Roger Craig had a dream of being on Jeopardy, and he took a QS approach to making it happen. He downloaded all historical Jeopardy questions and answers into a database, clustering the questions by topic and keyword, and built a web tool around it to quiz himself. He visualized his answers to see where his…
Wako Takayama loves the smell of line-dried clothes. She also likes that it’s a way to conserve energy. In this video, Wako reflects on methods she developed to increase energy conservation after moving from an apartment to a home. Her personal experiences resulted in her becoming trained as an energy efficiency consultant and volunteering in…
Boston QS organizer Michael Nagle gathers a panel of people in the social health space, and asks them: if not all behaviors can be incentivized, who are the users that succeed with your platform, and who are the users that fail? Dr. Joseph Kvedar of the Center for Connected Health, Rick Lee of Healthrageous, Jackie Thong…
Robert Carlsen, a recent graduate of Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, created a really neat little iPhone application called MobileLogger to better understand bicycle commuting behavior in New York City. Like many other activity tracking applications MobileLogger samples and stores data from the phone’s GPS and accelerometer. What makes MobileLogger unique is that the raw…
Gary Wolf shares “What we learned from starting Quantified Self” and starts off sharing a key journalistic secret – listen! He explains the biggest ‘surprise’ to come out of the QS experiment – face to face meetings are a key element in the collaborative knowledge making process. And in order to grow our family, let’s…
Inspired how powerful a connection he developed to the tracking of his runs, Chris Lukic has built a website to display data from a Nike sensor and put it in a social context. There are badges to reward users for various achievements, and something akin to a leaderboard for seeing how your runs compare to…
Eri Gentry describes her presentation ‘Social Studies’ as “like Quantified Self, but Quantified Us!” She has always been wiling to be a participant in normal experiments; however, she now realizes that she wants her data to improve herself. Now she uses Genomera.com to run her own experiments that allow the participants to be actively involved…
-This review was written by Craig Protzel for my class DIY Health at NYU ITP (Tisch School of the Arts). In this class, students design systems of self-care that help people take stock of themselves by exploring ways to measure, reflect and act upon their health and lifestyle.- Marie Dapuch’s “Mood Tracking” is very much focused…
The entertaining and curious Joe Betts-Lacroix shares his investigation to decide which device he will use to track sleep. He includes how he uses each device, his opinions and how one device makes him feel that his sleep matters! (Filmed at the Quantified Self Silicon Valley meetup at Stanford’s Calming Technologies lab.)
–This review was written by Ryan Viglizzo for my class DIY Health at NYU ITP (Tisch School of the Arts). In this class, students design systems of self-care that help people take stock of themselves by exploring ways to measure, reflect and act upon their health and lifestyle.– Moraveji asks, “What would it be like…
Ari cured himself of Crohn’s disease by experimenting with some unusual supplements, nutrition and fitness regimens, and tracking every bit of it. Four years ago, Ari was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. After a couple of years of intense pain, sixteen pills a day, and yet another visit to the hospital, he decided to take control…
John Sumser had a 7-year period of disasters after he quit smoking. He faced cancer twice, diabetes, asthma, divorce, family death, and more. Throughout this period, he was measuring himself. As he went back through his data, he found one central thing underlying all of his problems – stress. John tells his colorful story and…
Seth Roberts offers an interesting perspective on how he has been able to accelerate his own self-discovery. He suggests combining the QS rigor of self-experimentation with the Paleo ideas on diet, exercise, and lifestyle. Seth believes both QS and Paleo communities can benefit by learning from each other. In the video below, he also compares…
Joe Betts-LaCroix reports below on his recent experiment with a 28-hour day. He describes in engaging detail how he set up a tent in a crawlspace under his house, how his family reacted to the experiment, and what he learned from it. Definitely worth watching if you’re doing any sleep experiments! (Filmed at the 20th Bay Area…
Robin Barooah gives an insightful talk below on embodied learning. He used a binary self-tracking system, without keeping any of the data, to train his body to know what foods made him feel energized or lethargic. This awareness helped him to lose 45 pounds over the course of several months, but more importantly, it serves…
Here’s a quick video from Andrew Schaaf. He built an open source app for the Mac that logs attention and usage data, including your mouse position and which app is at the front of the stack on your screen. The data is private and stored on your computer. If you’re interested in raw data on,…
A recent meeting of the Amsterdam Quantified Self group saw a talk about health insights gleaned through accidental lifelogging. The speaker (who asked not to be named) has bipolar disorder, and has been using last.fm over the past 7 years to track his music listening and compare it with his friends’ music patterns. He talks about…
Ernesto Ramirez strikes again! His recent talk at QS San Diego called Quantified Self on a Budget is one of our most viewed videos. We were lucky enough to have Ernesto come up to San Francisco to share his thoughts on how self-tracking can enhance your memories and help you reflect on your life. He…
