Gary Wolf

December 7, 2008

Today’s story on self-tracking and self measurement in the Wall Street Journal featured Alexandra Carmichael, the co-founder of Cure Together, a platform for open source health research. (Alexandra is a regular at the QS Show&Tell.)

CureTogether is a community site where members can share information about their health. Alexandra has an excellent post on the Cure Together blog about how her site fits into disease research. Although Alexandra is a leader in building tools for self-tracking, the WSJ story focusing on her own self-tracking project. Here is the key paragraph:

Some of the new data collectors hope to make better
decisions about their activities and improve their quality of life. For
the last four months, Alexandra Carmichael, the founder of a health
research Web site called CureTogether in San Francisco, has been
tracking more than 40 different categories of information about her
health and personal habits. In addition to her daily caloric intake,
her morning weight and the type and duration of exercise she performs,
she also tracks her daily mood, noting descriptions such as “happiness”
and “feeling fat.”