Mike Schoeffler from Roadbud talks about the effect of noisy data on self-quantifying. A popular GPS running app had been giving him trouble – magically teleporting him and missing parts of his runs. He found it frustrating enough that he built his own app. Watch the video below to see the interesting discussion with the audience…
Ted Punt talks about a device developed by TNO (Dutch Institute for Applied Science) to measure vital signs from people at a distance of up to 10 meters. Heart rate, body motion, and respiration are measured continuously and wirelessly with this device, which should be on the market within a year. He goes into some…
Bryan Bishop tracks every social interaction he has with anyone, in person, on the phone, and online – and he’s been doing this since 2005. He discovered that he talks 60% of the time, and mostly interacts with people online. Also, the more people he talks to, the more lines of code he writes! Bryan…
Can you quantify love? Gary Krane wants to help couples have happier, stronger relationships. He is starting CoupleSpace as a lightweight version of couples therapy, for the noble goal of creating more love in the world. He has identified 26 needs for long, happy relationships, which are quantified as you use the app. CoupleSpace is…
Victor van Doorn describes himself as a nostalgic workaholic. He has tried and failed to keep diaries, so he decided to build an automatic one. His iPhone app Replay My Day (@replaymyday) collects his location and online activities each day, and builds it into a film – so when he’s lying in bed at night…
Nancy Dougherty made her own set of “mindfulness pills” – placebos labeled Focus, Willpower/Energy, Calm, and Happy. The pills were embedded with sensors that transmitted signals to her phone, recording each time she took the different pills, as well as her heart rate, activity rate, and sleep. Nancy works at Proteus Biomedical, in case you’re…
Cedric Yau trains in kung fu 12 hours a week. He wanted to track his his activity and energy levels, so he created a text-messaging service called Well+Tuner, where he also records notes for how he feels on different days. He learned how to time his food intake and 50 daily supplements for maximum energy,…
Joost Plattel quantifies 67% of his life. His dataset from 2010 has 40,000 data points. One way he tried to make sense of all this data was by building a heatmap of his public transportation data. He plans to build it out by integrating Foursquare, Twitter, Google latitude, and iPhone location data to get a…
Ernesto Ramirez has world-changing dreams but a grad student budget. He built his own walking desk, which recently helped inspire me to start standing to do my work, and he has also figured out how to do QS on the cheap, using free web tools. In the video below, he describes his favorite tools, including…
Sandy Santra gives a short, passionate talk below on turning Quantified Self data into knowledge. He tracks his migraines, time alone, happiness, meltdowns, panic attacks, and “zombification.” (I’d like to see a follow-up talk on that last one!) He gave the audience a framework for how to turn their own data into knowledge, for human…
Willempje Vrins and Leonieke Verhoog thought running was boring, and wanted to find a way to make it more beautiful and fun. They invented Figurerunning, and are building a community around it. With apps like Runkeeper, they run specific routes that make make shapes like hearts and soccer players. Then they share their drawings/runs on…
Do you have the energy to do everything but the focus to accomplish nothing? David Charron of UC Berkeley studies multi-tasking, distraction and sustainable attention. He has experimented with quantifying his own attention, and compared himself to a long-time meditator. Check out his results and the interesting audience questions in the video below. (Filmed at…
With all the disparate data streams coming out of Quantified Self tools, Stephanie Gerson saw a need to create a tool to bring them all together. In the video below, she presents her project Trackify, a new way for people to find correlations and trends in their data streams. Stephanie also puts out a call for…
What if you had a movie of your life that was made from a stream of pictures taken one every thirty seconds? Glenn Wolters and Jeroen Bos have built an iPhone app called Lifelapse to do this. They developed it as a school project. I noticed Joost Plattel using it at the recent QS conference…
A self-described “nerd,” Jamal has been dating for the past two years, and started trying to use data to answer the question, “how do you know if someone is right for you?” He built a model, quantified how well women that he dated matched up to his checklist of ideal characteristics, and decided to limit…
In this video, Laurie Frick presents her amazing work on daily activity charts and sleep charts translated to art at the NY Quantified Self Show&Tell #11 at Parsons The New School for Design.
Bruno Aziza from Microsoft recently caught up with Gary in San Francisco to talk about Quantified Self and our upcoming conference. Listen to Gary’s keen insights on the variety of things people are tracking, what they are learning from the process, and where this is all going.
In the talk below, Ben Blench shares his experience tracking his infant, including a discussion of the different tools he has used. He makes an interesting comparison between digital and analog, noticing that digital tools often have too many features and lack flexibility. (Filmed at the Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup in Amsterdam at Mediamatic) Ben…
In this video, Rajiv Mehta talks about the importance of remembering for good experimentation — carrying out the experiment as planned and capturing the results properly — and the difficulty of doing this well. He described a new app, Tonic, that helps people remember and keep track of their health activities, and shared examples of people…
Michael Doherty talks about the Open Source Real Time Mobile Sensor Platform he is developing, which flexibly connects a wide variety of sensors to online databases. He wants to make mobile tracking more accessible, and imagines people using it with their own sensors, as well as kids using it to collect environmental data on class…
