Learn How We Work
Self-trackers, toolmakers, and public health leaders associated with the Quantified Self community have been collaborating on tools, events, and research to support everyday science since 2011. The links below contain brief descriptions of some of our completed and ongoing projects. If you are aligned with our mission and think we might be able to help please get in touch.
Software
Access App for HealthKit
QS Access is a free iOS app that gives you your HealthKit data in tabular format so that you can explore it using Numbers, Excel, R, or any other common spreadsheet tool. Choose which metrics you'd like to see, then send a .csv file to yourself via email or text. No data is collected by any third party, including us.
Publishing
Article 27: Science Is A Human Right
For the 4th Quantified Self Public Health Symposium we published a pamphlet reprinting two key academic papers bearing on the renewed relevance of Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees a human right to participate in science.
2018
QS18 Conference
Allen Neuringer launches the conference with images from thirty years of teaching self-experimentation. Mad Ball deals with a serious fear about inherited disability by doing a self-conducted genetic study during pregnancy. Jordan Clark registers emotional reactions to racism. And Thomas Christiansen uses GPS to discover what plants make him sneeze.
2018
QS-CVD Symposium
A novel participatory research project has self-trackers measuring their blood cholesterol as often as once an hour. Pioneers of N-of-1 methods in science give a frank account of successes and failures. And senior leaders at NIH "All of Us" initiative set an agenda for connecting clinical research with the emerging practices of the Quantified Self to accelerate progress in cardiovascular health.
2016
QS Public Health
Addressing equity in the development of projects using self-collected data, this year's symposium gives us a chance to meet youth health organizers from the Karuk tribe in the Klamath Basin, the creators and users of the Do-It-Yourself Pancreas System, and key advocates and policymakers for a public infrastructure for health data access.
2015
QS Exposition
Something's happening. People are becoming more curious about themselves. Everybody's working on something, struggling with something, trying to achieve or learn something. And to do it they're tracking their time, location, strength, sleep, pain, food, love. In June of 2015, the first ever QS Exposition brought over 2000 people together to learn how to find their own answers with their own data.
2015
QS Europe Conference
Finnish engineers bring a prototype of the Oura ring. Hackers bring DIY instruments powered by Arduino. A cancer researcher self-diagnoses an autoimmune disease. A distracted driver uses his iPhone data to incriminate himself. And a middle school teacher teaches us to read 700 words per minute.
2015
QS15 Conference
We distribute a free app that that lets you view your Apple HealthKit data in a table. Bob Troia makes a map of electromagnetic radiation in his New York apartment. Valerie Lanard tracks quitting TV. Bethany Soule records her face for an entire week. And Paul LaFontaine measures HRV at work to discover just what's stressing him out.
2015
Symposium on Pain
A small accelerometer worn on the clothes to track breath. A headset that battles pain with VR games in imaginary snow. And a perfect simulation of a pharmaceutical capsule offering the world’s first branded placebo. At the end of the day, over fifty toolmakers, clinicians and people who manage chronic pain vote on who should receive the $10,000 challenge prize.
2014
QS Europe Conference
Crt Ahlin visualizes data from a million heartbeats. Jessica Richman keeps an updated list of the microbes in her gut. Maximilian Gotzler learns that certain foods make his testosterone drop. And Dr. Dana Greenfield offers a profound talk about tracking the memories that broke into her thoughts after the death of her mother.
2014
QS Public Health
Our first QS Public Health Symposium addressed the potential for self-collected data to inaugerate a new research program in the human sciences. This path-breaking symposium was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and convened in collaboration with the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego and the US Dept. of Human Resources, Office of the CTO.
2013
QS13 Conference
A mother investigates her son's blood sugar spikes and uncovers a stressful classroom situation she didn't know about before. A granddaughter presents a beautiful lifelog from a time when all self-tracking was by hand. And three founders of early QS companies talk frankly about why their project failed.
2013
QS Europe Conference
Pioneers of photo lifelogging, Niclas Johansson and Petri Määttä, bring their prototype "Memoto" mini-camera (later renamed the Narrative Clip) that snaps an automatic picture every 30 seconds. We get ahead of the coming cultural crisis by clipping four cameras to four anthropologists and sending them off for the day. The rest of us practice telling them "don't lifelog me."
2012
QS Conference
Philosopher Ann Wright shows her integrated tracking timeline that zooms in and out at any scale. Sasha Chua explains how to she uses DIY tools to track every item in her closet and make a diary of what she wears. And Joe Betts-LaCroix give gives us data from his personal experiment living his life in weeks of six twenty-eight hour days.
2011
QS Europe Conference
Danielle Roberts takes her decibel meter out to find the most silent places in the city. Martha Rotter's diet experiments reveal that Irish cows cause her acne. Hind Hobeika makes goggles to track her heart rate in the pool. Welcome to our first European conference, hosted by the founders of the QS community in the Netherlands.
2011
QS Conference
It's our very first conference. Self-trackers from all over the world discuss: "What is the Quantified Self?" We get a look at a novel sleep tracking headband called Zeo. Jason Jacobs demonstrated how he uses GPS to track his activity using a new app called Runkeeper. And Fenn Lipkowitz offers a multi-year activity diary accurate to 15 minutes that tells him he doesn't do as many dishes for his roommates as he thinks.
