Jamie Aspinall was interested in what his location history could tell him. As a Google Location user, his smartphone is constantly pinging his GPS and sending that data back to his Google profile. Using Google Takeout Jamie was able to download the last four years of his location history, which represented about 600,000 data points. In…
“I’ve been systematically tracking my life since the 24th of September, 2003.” A little over 10 years ago Alberto Frigo embarked on an ambitious project, 2004-2040, to understand himself. Starting with tracking everything his right (dominant) hand has used, he’s slowly added on different tracking and documentation projects. Keeping the focus on himself and his…
Rain Ashford is a PhD student in the Art and Computational Technology Program at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is based on the concept of “Emotive Wearables” that help communicate data about ourselves in social settings. This research and design exploration has led her to create unique pieces of wearable technology that both measure and…
Last year Alex Collins was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Prior to his diagnosis Alex was frequently engaged in different types of exercise and physical activity. After his diagnosis his doctor mentioned that he might have a hard time exercising and controlling his blood sugar to prevent hypoglycemia. In this talk, presented at the London…
Kiel Gilleade has been interested in measuring and visualizing physiological data for quite a while. In 2011, he presented his BodyBlogger project at the 2011 QS Europe Conference. In that talk he described what he learned from tracking and exploring a year of continuous heart rate data. This year, at the 2014 QS Europe Conference,…
Alex Tarling starting using the Mappiness app to track his happiness along with other contextual data. Over time the ritual of having to ask himself, “How happy am I?” three times a day started to get him thinking about how he thought about his own happiness and what that meant to him. In this talk,…
Four years ago Morris Villarroel was inspired to start writing things down. He started with a simple Muji notebook and begun adding some structure such as daily logs, life events, and review of books and articles he had read. In the process of filling out over 130 journals his process has evolved to include journaling…
Jan-Geert Munneke has had an issue with snoring for quite a while. He started off his self-tracking journey by tracking his snoring with the Snore Lab app. Having this data led him to think about how he could understand what was going on while he was sleeping. So, he decided to incorporate more sensors to…
There are many people in the QS community who are fascinated by understanding productivity. We’ve featured many different talks that explore different methods for tracking and hopefully improving productivity. At the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference we were happy to continue this exploration with a show&tell talk by Brian Crain. Brian has been thinking about…
Steve Dean is the co-organizer of our New York City QS meetup group. He’s also an avid self-tracker, using different methods and tools to understand his life. About three years ago Steve started to experience inflammation along his eyelids. After seeing a dermatologist and being diagnosed with atopic dermatitis he was prescribed a treatment regiment….
Kay Stoner has a long history of battling chronic health issues, but what bothers her the most is her experience with frequent headaches. Kay has been tracking her headaches since 2007 after she had a hard time communicating with her healthcare providers. What followed were years of attempting different types of methods of tracking, including…
Max Gotzler wasn’t feeling his best during a long German winter. He decided to visit his physician to see if anything might be going on. This included various blood and micronutrient tests. When he received his results he noticed that his testosterone levels were on the low end of the acceptable range. Intrigued by this,…
What does it mean to explore and understand your self-collected data? What should tools and sources think about to support exploration and data-driven introspection? Anne Wright has been working on understanding and answering these questions for the last few years while working on the Fluxtream project. In this short talk from the 2014 Quantified Self…
Back in 2012 we first heard about a neat little project developed by Stan James called Lifeslice. It’s a simple application that tracks what you’re doing with your computer by taking a photo of you, a screen capture, and current location (all stored locally on your machine). Stan kept working on the project adding tweaks…
Bob Troia was interested in his blood glucose. While he’s not a diabetic and he’s not out of range, he wanted to see if he could lower his fasting glucose levels. He started a long-term tracking experiment where he tested his blood glucose and began to explore the effects of supplementation and lifestyle factors. In…
Tracking diet and weight is nothing new and we’ve seen plenty of talks on the influence of carbohydrate intake on weight and metabolic values. But what about other pieces of daily life that could be influenced by what we eat? Adrienne Andrew Slaughter was testing out a new diet that included carbohydrate restriction. At the…
Yesterday we posted our first opening plenary talk from the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Today we are happy to post our second talk from the opening plenary session. Kaiton Williams is PhD student at Cornell in the department of Information Science. Over the last few years he’s been interested in how people use technology…
When we host our Quantified Self Conferences we put a lot of effort into our plenary sessions. Those sessions open and close each day and they’re the only time that all the attendees are together to listen and learn from speakers and presenters. Our opening plenary is especially important to us. It sets the stage…
As both a researcher and participant in her local Portland QS Meetup group, Dawn Nafus has been engaging in a process of understanding how people learn about their lives through personal data. As part of this work Dawn and her colleagues at Intel Research have been working on creating Intel Data Sense. In this short…
Rob Shields has been wearing a phone around his neck since 2012 in order to take one photo per minute. This persistent lifelogging has come with some technological and social hurdles. At the 2013 Quantified Self Global Conference, Rob explained some of the issues he’s been running into as he nears 300,000 photos. He also…
