The Personal Science Research Group

Personal science is the practice of using empirical methods to answer questions arising in daily life. The Personal Science Research Group builds tools, develops methods, publishes case studies, and shares discoveries made through doing, teaching and supporting “science at a human scale.”

Members

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen is a Danish technologist who spent five years tracking more than ten thousand sneezes to debug his grass pollen allergy. He is the cofounder of TOTTI Labs, which creates tools and methods for active self-tracking, with a focus on “precision psychotherapy.” He was the subject of the documentary Quantified Life (2017).

Martijn de Groot

Martijn de Groot is a Dutch medical scientist and managing director of Health Innovation Labs at Radboud University Medical Center. He has been studying, publishing, and teaching on Quantified Self, digital health, and personal science since 2011. He was formerly cofounder and director of the Quantified Self Institute at Hanze University of Applied Sciences.

Steven Jonas

Steven Jonas was the editor and information architect at QS Labs during its formative years, when he helped hundreds of presenters craft their self-research into public narratives. He has been self-tracking since 2005, starting with sleep and expanding into knowledge retention, stress, music, and other topics. He works professionally as a data analyst.

Jakob Eg Larsen

Jakob Eg Larsen is an associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), where he cofounded and leads the Mobile Informatics & Personal Data Laboratory. He cofounded Quantified Self Copenhagen. His research concerns personal informatics, self-tracking, and data visualization, focusing on how people can make useful discoveries from their own data. He is the cofounder of TOTTI Labs.

Sara Riggare

Sara Riggare was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at thirty-two, after nearly two decades of unexplained symptoms. In 2022, she became the first person to defend a PhD thesis based on self-research. She is a researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, where she pioneers innovative approaches for health and self-care. Her research focuses on chronic knowledge, meaning the knowledge and expertise that is needed for living a good life, in the presence of chronic conditions.

Gary Isaac Wolf

Gary Isaac Wolf is a journalist and author and formerly a contributing editor at Wired. In 2007, he cofounded Quantified Self as an international community of users and makers of self-tracking tools. He is currently the director of Article 27, a nonprofit supporting participation in science.

Publications

Selected work by members of the group on personal science, the Quantified Self, and self-tracking.

Our approach to supporting personal science practice is described in detail in the book The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe. Learn about the book →