Alexandra Carmichael

March 19, 2011

This is a guest post from QS regular Chris Hogg. Thanks Chris!

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Last week I had the great opportunity to see a series of demos of Lifelogging apps from students from Stanford’s CS247 Computer Human Interaction Design Studio.  I would really recommend checking out the demos here.  These are some great creative minds and future QSers (I hope).  It was pretty incredible to see what they were able to build in just 4-6 weeks.

Embedded below are slides from a guest lecture I gave to this class a few weeks ago entitled “User Generated Health”.  The theme of this talk was the value of user-generated data and its ability to reconnect us to our bodies and our health.  Those of you who have seen Gary Wolf’s TED talk will recognize that I completely ripped off his intro (flattery, right?), but i thought it was a really engaging way to ask the question of why we know more data about our cars than our bodies.  In the talk I also touch on a few companies who are proving that new data can be more valuable than a new drug, that Citizen Scientists have the power to disrupt the current clinical trial system and that the ultimate goal of personal data collection is self knowledge.