Bo Adler, a regular at Quantified Self Show&Tell meetups in the Bay Area, describes a mapping mashup he built for his naturalist friends who work with Outdoor Education groups. He wanted to capture their location from the pictures they are taking along the Pacific Crest trail, from Mexico to Canada. Find out what he learned…
Do you measure your body fat? Former personal trainer Dale Larson tells the San Francisco Bay Area QS Show&Tell folks about his LeanScale iPhone app to help monitor and discover trends in body fat. Dale Larson on LeanScale – Bay Area QS #13 from Gary Wolf on Vimeo.
Would you like to see a heatmap of all your FourSquare check-ins? Steven Lehrburger shows a mashup he built called Where Do You Go? at a recent New York City Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup. He combined Google Maps, the FourSquare API, and the GHeat heat mapping library to create surprising visualizations. With amusing audience brainstorming…
At the most recent New York City Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup, Esther Dyson took the microphone to talk about her recent experience at the GET (Genes, Environment, and Traits) Conference. She then answered questions from fellow QS’ers about the direct-to-consumer genome market, public perception (“why on earth would you want to sequence your genome?”), DNA…
In our final video from the last Bay Area Quantifed Self Show&Tell meetup, here is Dan Brown explaining the microphone he embedded into an air mattress under his bed to track motion, snoring, and heartrate during sleep. He describes how he assembled his invention, the tools he used for analyzing his data, and why he…
Matt Bell is a sleep hacker. Having struggled with sleep for much of his life, he now tracks it with Zeo and looks for patterns. In this talk, Matt reveals several factors that he has found to be helpful for getting a good night’s sleep. Matt Bell – Hacking the Sleep/Wake Cycle from Loren Risker…
Here is Eric Boyd’s talk about the device he built called North Paw – a haptic compass anklet that continuously vibrates in the direction of North. It’s a project of Sensebridge, a group of hackers that are trying to “make the invisible visible”. Eric Boyd – The North Paw: A Haptic Compass Anklet from Loren…
Zeo co-founder Ben Rubin spoke at the last Bay Area QS Show&Tell at Stanford University. Click on the video below to hear his thoughts about measuring sleep and the future of Zeo. Ben Rubin on Zeo and sleep measurement from Kevin Kelly on Vimeo.
At the last Bay Area QS Show&Tell, Mike Kirkwood of Polka gave a terrific status update about Open Mobile Health Exchange (OMHE), a microsyntax for people and machines. [The] goal is to have a microsyntax that allows applications and devices and share streams of information…. Multiple things can come into one person’s stream,and we will…
With apologies for the slow pace of getting these videos posted to the web site, today I bring you a video of a mind-blowing presentation by Ben Lipkowitz of his life-logging project at the last QS Show&Tell. As usual, this is a raw documentary record, made on the fly, so don’t be surprised by the…
At the the Bay Area QS Show&Tell #11, Maren Connary gave a follow-up talk that explored how her detailed life log, which she keeps on paper in thick binders, could be enhanced by a digital life logging system. You can’t see much of what she is talking about in this video, because the images are…
Robin Barooah presented his new meditation tracker, called “Equanimity” at the recent QS Show&Tell hosted by MedHelp. A meditation practice is a powerful tool for increased well being and yet, for something so simple and cost-free, it surprisingly difficult to maintain. The problem of “resistance” in meditation is well known. Even people with long years…
The Mayo Clinic held their Transforming Healthcare Symposium last week in Rochester, MN. On display were the latest innovations they are brewing up in their SPARC Innovation Lab, like real-time, on-screen specialist consultation when you go to visit your primary care doctor. A stellar lineup of speakers from Intel’s Craig Barrett to IDEO’s Tim Brown…
Mark Carranza has been keeping a list of his ideas since 1984. His list has more than a million entries, with more than 7 million connections between entries. Although the media window above appears to contain a video of Mark’s talk at QS #3, Mark preferred that MX not be shown yet, so what you…
In this inspiring talk from the recent New York City QS Show&Tell Hulda Emilsdottir and Josh Klein talk about the system Hulda developed to analyze their relationship to their possessions, and then about another system Hulda made for buying clothes based on seasonal usefulness, care-requirements, and compatibility with her other clothes. [For info about the…
In this video from the recent QS Show&Tell David Reeves of Limeade describes the challenges of providing a universal self-tracking system in the context of an employee wellness program. The Q&A covers a lot of great territory, including how to make self-tracking rewarding, how to encourage participation, analysis techniques, and privacy issues.
Deep mysteries of human nature will be exposed by self-tracking, aspects of our behavior so disconcerting and bizarre that they will lead us to question whether we understand ourselves at all. I know this is true because such disconcerting results are already being produced at a rapid pace by experimental psychologists, and self-tracking brings the…
I’ve been meaning to link to this post for a couple of weeks. Nathan Yau over at Flowing Data has been writing personal data collection projects quite a bit. In this post, A Perfect Personal Data Collection Application, he talks about what is missing from current tools and about his dream system for personal data…
In this inspiring talk from the recent QS Show&Tell, author, scientist, and self-experimentalist Seth Roberts explains why worries about experimental design are overblown. You will learn what’s wrong with your experiments by starting to do them.
Self-tracking is about self knowledge. But what if the knowledge you want is contained in the minds of others? In these videos, Joe and Lisa Betts-LaCroix discuss self-tracking in a relationship, and Paul Sas shares his proposal for a “dynamical dinner party.”
