The New Examined Life - Self-Tracking Story in WSJ

Gary Wolf

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."

 

4 Comments

#1 | Sun, 12-07-08 08:55 | Alexandra Carmichael

Thanks for the post, Gary! It’s exciting to see this trend being picked up by national media.

We’re looking forward to presenting CureTogether at Tuesday’s QS Show&Tell. See you there!

 
#2 | Thu, 12-11-08 12:17 | Jeanne

Gary,

I have had the pleasure of interacting with Alexandra. I write a blog about endometriosis and other chronic illnesses. Alexandra is very supportive and her organization has a great philosophy!

Jeanne

 
#3 | Thu, 02-12-09 10:11 | Zosia Bielski

Hi Gary,

I’m a reporter with The Globe and Mail in Toronto working on a story about self-trackers, to run nationally next Thursday. Would you have a moment to speak with me over the phone by Tuesday evening?

I look forward to it, Zosia

Zosia Bielski // Globe Life // 444 Front Street West Toronto, Ontario // M5V 2S9 // 416.585.5337 zbielski@globeandmail.com // www.globeandmail.com

 
#4 | Tue, 03-02-10 01:55 | Vladimir Levin

Check out http://wellbook.org - a great tool for tracking your illness as well as communicating with other people who are coping with health problems! Our goal is to create a site that’s free of clutter and easy and fun to use!

 

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