Show&Tell

Consolidating Gadgets

Eric Jain

Eric Jain was using five devices to track his location, steps, workouts, heart rate and his environment. He attempted to consolidate all of those devices into one. He shares whether the new device worked better than his existing ones.

Tracking What I Do Versus What I Say I'll Do

Eli Ricker

For years, Eli Ricker has tracked her self-created "Life Satisfaction" score and whether or not she did what she said she would. She’ll describe what this practice taught her about effective goal setting, true productivity, and deeper satisfaction.

What I'm Learning From My Meditation App

Alec Rogers

Alec Rogers wanted to see if there was a way to measure mindfulness after meditation, so he built his own simple, open-source meditation tracker.

My Blood Values From Diet And Other Activities

Benjamin Best

Ben Best measured his blood glucose, ketones, triglycerides, and cholesterol in response to a wide variety of foods and other activities. He'll show how his analysis changed his dietary choices. 4

Blood Oxygen On Mt. Everest

Fah Sathirapongsasuti

Fah Sathirapongsasuti's project, carried out on his way up Mt. Everest, allowed him to carefully evaluate both the drop in his blood oxygenation and the effect of acclimatization—and contained some useful discoveries.

#100daysofqs: Daily Art From Data

Lillian Karabaic

After 10 years of collecting data on herself, Lillian Karabaic embarked on a project to make an art piece from her data for 100 consecutive days, with pieces ranging from "Mildly Scary Things I Have Done" to "Burritos Per Year."

Using Running And Cycling Data To Inform My Fashion

Anna Franziska Michel

Anna Franziska Michel uses her running and cycling data as material for her startling and beautiful work in fashion design.

Three Marathons On Zero Calories

Mikey Sklar

How far can we go using our fat as fuel? Mikey Sklar used a wide array of tools to guide his training for running 76 miles in less than 24 hours without the use of food.

Which Grasses Aggravate My Allergies?

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen

Thomas Christiansen's allergies are aggravated when he runs during grass pollen season. For this project he used a GoPro to document passing vegetation and a device to record his sneezes in order to pinpoint which plants activated his nose.

Tracking Glucose As A Person Without Diabetes

Justin Lawler

Justin Lawler tracked his glucose over four months using a continuous glucose monitor. He compiled a total of 21,000 glucose measurements, along with many other biometrics, to gain insight into what affects his metabolism.

How Work Distractions Affect My Focus

Madison Lukaczyk

Madison Lukaczyk wanted to improve her focus by controlling her distractions. She had already blocked distracting web sites, but what about work related channels that nonetheless constantly interrupted her concentration? Using time-tracking data from RescueTime, exported to R Studio, she created visualizations that revealed how her workflow was affected by chat threads, emails, and texts.

Cholesterol Levels While Nursing

Whitney Erin Boesel

After giving birth, Whitney Erin Boesel learned that her cholesterol was very high. Given her family history, it seemed that an intervention was in order. But what if she did nothing and simply made observations?

To Teach Quantified Self, First Know Thyself

Michael Lim

Michael Lim, teacher, and Alex Truong, 12th grader, redesigned the AP Statistics course at Summit Shasta High School to have students learn by analyzing their self-tracking data. They prepared by doing their own QS project with Rescuetime, MyFitnessPal, multivariate regression, and more.

Running Storytelling

Albara Alohali

Albara Alohali combined self-collected data and storytelling to help himself meet a personal challenge: running a marathon every month.

Separating Work And Home

Lydia Lutsyshyna

Lydia Lutsyshyna tracked the timing and location of her activities, then experimented with clearly separating studying and non-studying intervals to see if this simple delineation produced noticeable effects in her behavior.

Does My Stomach Anticipate My Meals?

Benjamin Smarr

Benjamin Smarr has been collecting glucose, body temperature, heart rate, and stomach activity data to see how his body responds to scheduled meals, and whether it keeps the schedule when he fasts.

Tracking Breathing To Control My Focus

Shamay Agaron

Shamay Agaron has been using a breath measurement instrument, the Spire, to understand more about his patterns of focus.

Quantifying My Phd: Pomodoros And Productivity

Maggie Delano

How much work does it take to get a PhD? How do marathon work sessions affect future productivity? Maggie Delano will answer these questions and more using data from tracking over 5000 pomodoros over the course of earning her PhD.

Learning An Impossible Form Of Exercise

Jessica Ching

Exercising without food for a person with diabetes is akin to scuba diving without air; medical “experts” say it’s impossible. Jessica Ching was unwilling to believe this and conducted a series of personal trials. She has since run thousands of miles, almost all without eating.

What Insidetracker Taught Me About My Five-Day Fast

Kyrill Potapov

Kyrill Potapov underwent a five-day fast to measure the impact of cell death (apoptosis) on cholesterol and hormone levels, using two InsideTracker panels to show before and after states.

Tracking My Personal Reliability

Daniel Reeves

Daniel Reeves has made it a strict personal rule that every time he utters a statement starting with "I will" to someone, no matter how casually, he logs the commitment, with a due date, and keeps track of when he follows through.

A Self-Study Of My Child's Genetic Risk

Mad Ball

Mad Ball is a carrier for a rare genetic disease that entailed the risk of having a child with a serious intellectual disability. But how much risk? Through careful self-investigation based on consumer genomics, a reasonable estimate turned out to be possible.

Ten Years Of Tracking My Location

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki will talk about what he's learned from using extensive continuous location data, based on a decade of experience.

Tracking Across Generations

Aaron Yih

Since the day Aaron Yih was born, his grandfather documented his life in large photo collages he hung on the walls. Now that his grandfather is 84, Aaron is using digital archiving and modern lifelogging tools to continue the record that his grandfather began over two decades ago.

Quantifying The Effects Of Microaggressions

Jordan Clark

Jordan Clark used his heart rate variability (HRV) data to measure psychological effects of microaggressions as part of his research quantifying the Black experience.

My Headaches From Tracking Headaches

Jakob Eg Larsen

Jakob Eg Larsen thought tracking headaches would be an easy task. But the very first question turned out to be less straightforward than it seemed: What counts as a headache?

Building My External Brain

Todd Greco

For the last decade Todd Greco has been using a variety of data sources to build up his exobrain, including recording every location he's visited, allowing him to call up each place individually or map them.

Finding The Optimal Training Zone

Ralph Pethica

Ralph Pethica has been combining fitness tracking and subjective data with genetics, using techniques from his work with professional athletes to help find the optimal way for him to train.

Estrogen And Invention

Shara Raqs

Do hormones activate creative thinking? Using fertility data from 70+ cycles, Shara Raqs discovered the time in her cycle that she was most likely to experience eureka moments.

A Decade Of Tracking Headaches

Stephen Maher

Stephen Maher started with paper and pen, and eventually developed his own app to help him learn about his headache patterns and manage his actions, medications, and expectations.

My Biological Rhythms In Sickness And In Health

Azure Grant

Azure Grant is interested in circadian and ultradian rhythms. Over a 10-day period she collected EEG, EKG, EGG, glucose levels, and body temperature measurements to explore how these different systems interacted.

Learning From Excuses

Valerie Lanard

Over years of tracking exercise, Valerie Lanard inadvertently compiled an incredible data set by documenting her excuses for not exercising. From this unexpected trove she learned why she tended to get sick, how she's prone to injury, and also the importance of logging a little extra context.

Improving Skin Health

Matt Velderman

Matt Velderman tracks skin health to figure out what diet and supplements have a positive effect on his skin, along with other personal topics, including weight training and home energy use.

Normalizing Blood Pressure by Improving Fitness

Siva Raj

Siva Raj was interested in lowering his blood pressure. With a family history of cardiovascular disease and heart attacks he was worried about slightly elevated blood pressure (pre-hypertension). Despite a regular exercise and healthy diet, his blood pressure measurement didn’t respond. After reading literature about the link between fitness and cardiovascular health, Siva decided to change his training to improve his fitness. He decided to incorporate a increased intensity into his routine. After a short period of time he had increases in this fitness and was able to observe the reduction in blood pressure he was looking for. Siva explains his methods at the Boston QS Meetup group.

To Sleep-Perchance To Remember

Ariel Berwaldt

For about the past 10 years, Ariel was consistently and chronically fatigued and tired and I really didn’t know why. Ariel went to many doctors and got many diagnoses and a lot of medications and nothing really seemed to be helping. Ariel then went into a sleep study, a polysomnography, and it came out that she had sleep apnea with zero percent deep sleep and would waken up about 10 times an hour. According to the deep sleep, her 30 years old is actually a 60 years old.

Tracking My Sleep And Resting Heart Rate

Jakob Eg Larsen

Jakob Eg Larsen is an Associate Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. He has long-term data on his sleep and his resting heart rate. In this video, Jakob talks about how these two types of data are linked. He also shares what he learned and the insights that he has obtained from the longitudinal tracking of his sleep and resting heart rate.

Physiological measurements at classical concerts

Elliott Hedman

Memomics And Longevity

Stuart Calimport

Stuart set out to sequence a memome to find memes ("ideas" and "concepts" rather than viral pictures) associated with longevity and find factors that affect how his memetics change. He recorded most of his ideas that they had over time. For over two years, he logged over 25,000 ideas and categorized them whether he thought those ideas would increase his lifespan or decrease he lifespan. He shares what he's learned, and some inspiration about large scale memome tracking.

Lessons From the Gray Zone Between QS and CBT

Michael Kazarnowicz

Michael Kazarnowics is a personal trainer and an active QS member since 2003. He talks about the lessons from the gray zone between self-hacking and self-tracking, with an emphasis on the intersection of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and QS.

Self Experimentation

Mariusz Nowostawski

Mariusz works in a multi-disciplinary research group at the University of Otago. In this talk, he shares why he's life logging and what benefits he has received from it.

Using IOT for Motivation

Charlampos Doukas

Charlampos Doukas is a maker, he likes to build devices, collect and analyze data. He also has a blog, Internet of Things so he spent a lot of time working from home, sitting in front of a computer, which is really bad for his health. Since he graduated and started working, he gained a lot of weight and his blood cholesterol is rising. In this talk, he discusses about how he uses Internet of Things combined with devices to motivate him to be more active. He shares his learned experiences in this talk.

Tracking Symptoms

Natasha Gajewski

Natasha Gajewski, a healthy woman and mom became a self-quantifier due to an illness. In order to get a diagnosis by a doctor she had to track her symptoms. She developed an iOS app to help her do this. The app was built for her, but recently diagnosed patient with a complex autoimmune disease. In this talk, she shares her experiences about tracking symptoms for her illness.

Self Knowledge Through Textile-Based Sensing

Anne Prahl

Anne Prahl is a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Arts at London. Anne Prahl explores textile based sensing and how it has effected her with regard to self-knowledge. In this video, she talks about how she got into Quantified Self and how she used self-tracking to inspire her research project.

The Arithmetic of Life

David Gordon

David Gordon does strategy at Intel. He's had diabetes for 15 years. He talks about diabetes and the importance of numbers from the perspective of a type 1 diabetic. He discusses how diabetes Type I is really the interplay of a way of life, carbs, your blood sugar, and the amount of insulin you inject.

Measuring Exhaustion and Readiness

Philipp Kalwies

Philipp Kalwies talks about the risks of over-training and how an athlete can measure their body's level of exhaustion. He believes that the right amount and intensity of training is the key to successful performance for athletes. In this talk, he discusses the testing of a new device which promises to conveniently deliver data that athletes need to measure their exhaustion and intensity and help to find the right moment for their next workout.

Long Run Quantification

Matthew Beard

Matt Beard, a diabetic, talks about using self-quantification to help him train for an ultra-marathon. With a limited time to train, he would like to do more of the things that work and less of the things that don't.

Self-Monitoring and Cancer Survivorship

Ian Clements

After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ian started measuring even more of his lifestyle in the hope of surviving longer. In this talk, he shares how self-monitoring with a body composition monitor is a useful took for assessing cancer progress between doctor visits, potentially allowing lifestyle relationships with it to be explored.

Past Present Future

Sara M. Watson

Sara Watson talks about how she uses digital time capsules like Timehop to resurface some of her archived personal data. She also talks about her family history of self tracking and genealogy. Tracking and reflecting on that data gives her a sense of time, place, history, and context.

Managing Type 1 Diabetes

Alex Collins

Last year Alex Collins was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Prior to his diagnosis Alex was frequently engaged in different types of exercise and physical activity. After his diagnosis his doctor mentioned that he might have a hard time exercising and controlling his blood sugar to prevent hypoglycemia. In this talk, presented at the London QS meetup group, Alex described his process for tracking and understanding the data that affects his day-to-day life so that he could live his life normally without a high risk of complications.

Salt & Carb

Winslow Strong

Winslow Strong talks about experiment with eating a very low carbohydrate, paleo diet and how he introduced salt and carbohydrates back in.

Spaced Repetition: A Cognitive QS Method for Knowledge Acquisition

Roger Craig

Roger Craig, a Jeopardy Tournament of Champions winner, goes over the concept of spaced repetition and how he used Anki to not only win a game show, but to memorize anything.

Brain Optimization

Ken Snyder

After his grandma started to show signs of dementia in 1982, Ken Snyder became interested in knowing more about dementia and how he can lower his risk. In this video, he talks about his experience in lowering dementia risk by optimizing his diet. He shares how he did it and what he learned.

The Effects of a Year in Ketosis

James McCarter

In 2013, James McCarter reduced his carbs and tracked his journey. In 2014, he adopted a ketogenic diet where he gave up sugar and starch and got 80% of his calories from fat. In this talk, James discusses how he tracked his ketones and what he learned.

Continuous Glucose Measurement

Richard Sprague

Presentation at Seattle Quantified Self, 2019-01-10

Does Biofeedback Help Improve Focus And Meditation?

Agnieszka Krzemińska

Agnieszka has meditated with the Muse meditation headband for almost two years. By doing this, she hopes to improve her focus and concentration ability during the meditation session and afterward. In this video, she discusses what she did and shares her data from her meditation apps and the Muse meditation headband. She also shares what she learned from her experiment.

When Anxiety Knocks

Juliana Chua

Juliana Chua works for Zensorium, which is located in Singapore. Zensorium came up with a product called Bing which helps one measure oneself passively on a day-to-day basis. The product not only measures mood, but it also tracks sleep and activity. In this talk, she shares how she used quantification to temper the travails of her own life, as well as help both national athletes and regular working people.

The Great Book Project of 2013

Kendra Albert

Wanting to change their reading habits, Kendra Albert embarked on "The Great Book Project of 2013", a New Year's resolution to read five books a week for nine months.

Stressing Out Loud

Steven Jonas

Steven Jonas discovered through an EEG assessment that he had a strong “freeze” response to stressful situations. This inspired him to use his emWave to monitor his stress levels, hack it to alert him whenever he got too stressed, and change his patterns at work. Steven shares his experience and learnings in this insightful project.

Four Weeks Of Blood Sugar Tracking

Eric Jain

Inspired by research that shows that the blood sugar response to foods are highly individual, Eric got a prescription for a FreeStyle Libre, a minimally invasive continual glucose meter. He found that certain carbs were worse than others, sweets that are fine as long as they are in moderation, and the influence that sleep and exercise have on mediating the blood sugar response.

Memorizing My Daybook

Steven Jonas

Steven Jonas has been using SuperMemo since he read Gary Wolf's article about the tool in 2010. In this talk, Steven introduces a new project he’s working on using SuperMemo–memorizing a daily log he keeps of interesting things that happened during the day. Watch his fascinating talk to hear how he’s attempting to recall every day of this life.

Reverse Mood Tracking

Alan Greene

A fascinating way of using mood tracking in a clinical setting has been pioneered by Dr. Alan Greene. His experiment with Reverse Mood Tracking came from pausing briefly before walking into an exam room to note his current mood. Then, after walking through the door, he would pause and note whether his mood had changed. His hypothesis was that the new mood would reflect, at least in part, with what was going on in the room. To check his hypothesis he would make a probing statement or question to see if his perception was indeed accurate.

What Causes my Heart Rhythm Disorder?

Mark Drangsholt

Dr. Mark Drangsholt is a long-time self-tracker who also teaches evidence-based medicine at the University of Washington. He has tracked blood pressure and exercise, atrial fibrillation and what triggers it, deep sleep and sex, diet and body fat. In the video, Mark shares what he learned about his arrhythmia triggers, and how his self-tracking data helped sway his cardiologist to do a less invasive procedure. He also makes a great case that Quantified Self experiments can be more scientifically valid than many of his colleagues would like to admit.

Where There's Data There's Hope

Larry Smarr

Larry Smarr is a scientist, a physicist, and computer scientist professor. After moving to La Jolla from Illiniois in 2000, he began to learn about nutrition and his weight. He started using all sorts of self-tracking devices. In this talk, he shares what he has learned over the past 10-12 years and why he came to the conclusion that where there’s data, you can actually quantify your body and get a sense of knowledge and with that knowledge, there is hope for understanding.

Leaning into Grief

Dana Greenfield

Dana Greenfield's mom was a surgeon, professor, researcher, entrepreneur, blogger, tennis player, and a mentor to many medical students. Unexpectedly, she passed away in February, 2014. To help her process her mother's death, Dana began tracking every time she thought of her mother by writing down what triggered the memory, the mood it inspired, etc. Watch Dana's talk as she shares her experiences of using self-tracking to better understand her own grief and the role her mother continues to play in her life. 

Tracking my Son's Diabetes

Vivienne Ming

Vivienne Ming is an accomplished neuroscientist and an entrepreneur. When she’s not conducting research or working on new ideas she’s busy taking care of her son, Felix. Two years ago Felix was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. Vivienne and her partner tackled his diagnosis head on and started tracking everything they could. In this talk, Vivienne learns through tracking her son's heart rate and blood sugar constantly that stress is a factor of his blood sugar level peaks. She explains what they’re learning together about tracking her son's diabetes.

Experiments In Treating My Crohn's Disease

Ari Meisel

Four years ago, Ari Meisel was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. After a couple years of intense pain, sixteen pills a day, and another visit to the hospital, he decided to take control of his pain. So he started to track everything and eventually cured himself of Crohn's disease by experimenting with some unusual supplements, nutrition and fitness regimens. In this talk, Ari discusses what he learned from his experiment and shares his tracking regimen.

Tracking Happiness

Ashish Mukharji

Ashish Mukharji is the author of Run Barefoot and Run Healthy. About two and half years ago, he bought a book called "How of Happiness" for an extra boost in happiness. He wasn't unhappy, but he enjoyed the instructions of the book. In this talk, Ashish describes doing three years of continuous happiness tracking, using a single number.

We Are Not Waiting

Dana Lewis

Dana Lewis became a reluctant self-tracker at the age of 14 when she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Dana and her partner Scott Leibrand have been developing a DIY artificial pancreas that is built on top of the data flows from Dana’s continuous glucose monitor. In this talk, she describes the role that access to data plays in their DIY pancreas, with immediate and profoundly positive effects on her life. She also explains why she's constantly pushing for patients to stop waiting for solutions and go the DIY route.

Physiological measurements at classical concerts

Elliott Hedman

Elliott Hedman studied himself and others' physiological measurements during a classical concert. In addition to tracking himself and others with EDA sensors, he also videotaped the sensors. He learned that the transitions from loud to quiet or the reverse triggered everyone's sympathetic nervous systems activities. Interestingly, however, he learned how humans are receptive to familiar sounds, because when a xylophone was played, Hedman was the only one triggered because he used to play when he was a kid. In this talk, Elliot speaks to the benefits of both: being less quantitative and more qualitative with your data and less "self-centric" and more "community-centric" when analyzing.

Breaking the TV Habit

Valerie Lanard

In August of 2014, Valerie Lanard committed to quitting TV and focused on how her environment and triggers reinforced a behavior she felt “locked into.” In this talk, she discusses her fascinating project to quit TV for thirty days. She shares the process, what ended up replacing all of her TV time, and lessons she learned about herself when she was able to break the habit.

Quantified Brain and Music for Self-Tuning

Rocio Chongtay

In this talk, Rocio Chongtay shares her novel and thoughtfully designed experiments in using music to adjust her concentration and relaxation depending on what she’s doing. Using a consumer EEG device from Neurosky, Rocio tried different types of music while tracking the relaxation and concentration dimensions identified by the Neurosky algorithm. She talks about the experiences she had with Neurosky in her lab, and how she turned those techniques to understanding something about her own mind.

The Data Is In, I'm a Distracted Driver

Robert Macdonell

Before moving to Tennessee from Seattle, Robby Macdonnell did not even own a car so driving was a new feeling for him. He started transportation logging and time-tracking after realizing that he was spending more than an hour a day driving. He wanted to have some bragging rights about how he is not as bad as other people when it comes to being a distracted driver. He combined two data streams, using Automatic and RescueTime, to prove that he does not use his phone while driving nearly as often as other drivers. Only the data didn’t agree.

Draw a Face a Day

Ellis Bartholomeus

Ellis Bartholomeus is a game designer and received a book from her sister called "Face a Day" which got her curious about how she could motivate herself to change her behavior. She started drawing a face a day for six months and began to track more information like weather, drinking and food. She shares how she found ways to become both happier and healthier using her visualized data.

Finding My Optimum Reading Speed

Kyrill Potapov

Kyrill Potapov is a Phd candidate and teacher to 12 year olds. Kyrill used a tool called "Spritz" to help track his own reading and his students' reading speed and comprehension. He learned that using Spritz both he and his students had not only faster reading speeds, but also greater comprehension. In this talk, Kyrill shares how he did his experiment and the insight gained from this thoughtful project.

Know Thy Cycle, Know Thyself

Ilyse Magy

Ilyse Magy talks about how she took the mystery out of the menstrual cycle with a book called, "Fertility Awareness Method." By tracking certain metrics daily, she learned why her body is doing what it's doing and can conduct her sexual and emotional activity accordingly. She presents this important project at the 2015 Quantified Self Conference.

Spaced Listening

Steven Jonas

Steven knows that he needs to listen to an album a few times before he begins to like it. Despite knowing this, he found that he often chose not to listen to a new album because he knew it would be somewhat unpleasant. In this talk, he shows a system he created that schedules when he should listen to a particular album in the hopes that it would lead him to liking new music.

Crying

Robin Weis

Robin Weis never thought crying was a big deal until her brother tried to commit suicide in February 2014. She then began a remarkable personal study to track her crying for almost 2 years. Throughout her tracking, she cried a total of 394 times and detailed how intense the cries were, and where and whom she cried with. Robin shares her deep learning about life, relationships and the human experience at QS17.

Hot Stuff: Body Temperature And Ovulatory Cycles

Azure Grant

Azure Grant has been tracking her ovulatory cycles for nearly a year by tracking her body temperature every minute. In the past six months, she expanded her tracking to include her friend and mother to compare results with hers. In this video, Azure shares the data and what she has learned from it.

Taking On My Osteoporosis

Justin Lawler

In 2013, at the age of 38, Justin was diagnosed with osteoporosis. After exhausting the usual route of blood tests and scans from the doctors, Justin started to take things more into his own hands by self-tracking. In this video, he talks about how he did it, where is he with with osteoporosis and what other health issues he uncovered from self-tracking.

My Health Scars

Ellis Bartholomeus

Ellis Bartholemeus is a big fan of quantifying and at QS17 she discusses her "quantified body" as she tracked her physical scars. She also shares the data on her scars which includes the date of the injury, size of the scar, impact of the scar, and healing time. In this talk, Ellis exposes the intimate and deep learning that come from simply slowing down to examine a part of one's life--in this instance, her scars.

Tracking Productivity For Personal Growth

Kyrill Potapov

Kyrill Potapov was curious about his work and life balance and wanted to see how much time he was spending on personal growth compared to work. In order to do his experiment, he hacked RescueTime to track how he uses his computer to make it a tool for personal growth, rather than work optimization. In this video, he discusses how he hacked RescueTime to actually grow a plant based on time spent on personal growth in order to find deeper meaning in his productivity and ultimately his life.

What If My Life Was The Economy Of A Small Country?

Lillian Karabaic

Lillian Karabaic has been producing annual reports based on her hand-collected data for 10 years. In this video, she show off her 2016 report, which chronicles her finances, health, and rapid career change in the style of The Economist magazine.

Balancing Neurotransmitters In Neurological Illness

Sara Riggare

Sara Riggare had her first symptoms of Parkinson's in 1984 when she was only 13 years old. In this video, she talks about the medications that helps her to move, think, and function. In this video, she shares how she keeps up with her progressive neurological illness by tweaking and re-tweaking her medications through tracking, so she doesn't have to take the generic prescription. The medications are essential to live her life, but she has learned that the dosing can be modified to allow her to still feel like herself.

Seeing My Data In 3d

Stephen Cartwright

Stephen Cartwright has been tracking his family member's location for years. He tracks where they are everyday of the year. Stephen then makes glass, plastic, and resin sculptures that capture the beauty of the self-recorded data. The sculptures float in the air or are captured in clear blocks to reveal intersections and correlation of the data. In this video, Stephen shares how he does his work and what he learns from the process.

My Numbers Sucked But I Made This Baby Anyway

Whitney Erin Boesel

In 2015, Whitney learned that it was "too late" for her to have children. So she started tracking her AMH (and other hormones) as a result, but the most important things she learned had nothing to do with endocrinology. In this video, she discusses the abnormally low numbers and how she managed to conceive and give birth to a very healthy baby despite all of the odds against her.

Over-Instrumented Running: What I Learned From Doing Too Much

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen

For the last two years, Thomas has been on an intense quest to figure out how to improve his running. This led him to use many more instruments that might seem rational at first glance. In this video, he shares what he learned from doing too much.

Mindfulness, Technology, and Me

Charles Wang

Charles Wang is one of the co-founders of Lumo BodyTech, the makers of the LUMOback posture sensor. When he’s not building new self-tracking tools, he’s taking some time to watch the world around him. Watch this great Ignite talk from Charles to hear about his observations and how they apply to his long-term posture tracking.

Butterfly Project: Swimming Goggles To Measure Heart Rate

Hind Hobeika

Hind Hobeika is a swimmer and an engineer from Beirut. She wanted to monitor her heart rate while she was swimming, so she built goggles that sense and display her heart rate in real time. It’s called the Butterfly Project. In this talk, she describes how she designed and assembled the goggles, the challenges she faced, and future prospects for the project.

Weight Loss Through Embodied Learning

Robin Barooah

After Robin Barooah moved to the USA, he was in denial about his weight. He worked for a startup and didn't really have time to pay attention to his food. He knew something was changing about his appearance, but every time he looked in the mirror he seemed to think he look the same. However, he was only comfortable posting a certain picture as his social media profile. After a couple of years, an old friend noticed his weight gain and Robin could no longer remain in denial. In this talk, Robin discusses how how he lost 45 pounds in the course of about 18 months through embodied learning.

Tracking my Bruxism

Peter Kuhar

Peter Kuhar presents his findings on tracking his bruxism (teeth grinding). Peter used an infrared video camera at his bedside to film his mouth at night and shares his findings in this video.

Putting My Blood Metrics in Context

Gil Blander

Gil Blander discusses InsideTracker's Innerage score and the effect nutrition and exercise have on physiomarkers, biomarkers, and performance. He shares the tracking of his weight, activity, heart rate variability, blood tests, and genetic data during the last year.

Owning My Quantified Self Data

Aaron Parecki

After years of collecting Quantified Self data, Aaron Parecki began moving more of his data onto his personal website rather than letting it sit in someone else's cloud. This insures that his data will stick around even after apps and devices go away.

Overthinking Everything I Own

Matt Manhattan

Matt Manhattan started tracking absolutely every physical possession he has in his life. In this video, he talks about his obsession with keeping a visual and textual diary of everything he owns. He pulled everything out from all of his drawers and cabinets and started an inventory list and made it public. Through this process, Matt shares how his life focus has shifted by taking deep inventory on material items.

Sleep As A Galaxy

Danielle Roberts

Danielle Roberts shares the background behind the artwork that she designed for Emfit. Danielle is a long-time tracker and took a month of sleep data she captured using Emfit. She analyzed the data and visualized it into a final presentable art piece that she calls "Sleep as a Galaxy."

Diabetes Viz

Peter Kok

Peter Kok is a diabetic with a background in data visualization. In this video, he discusses how he has gathering data from his insulin pump, continuous glucose sensor and activity tracker. He also developed a visualization tool to make sense of these diverse data sources.

Felt Routines

Stephen Fortune

In this video, Stephen talks about the place of cyclical time and different ways of thinking and representing time and self tracking. He discusses how it is possible to self-track cyclical time. He talks about the Marxist philosopher, Henry Lefebvre, to outline the means and the methods towards comprehending what shapes our experience of time. He also talks about his theory of rhythm analysis as outlined in the posthumous published rhythm analysis and space-time in everyday life. He hopes that the concept of felt routines is very integral to that theory.

Understanding Fitness With Muscle Activation Data

Shelly Jang

In this video, Shelly Jang shares her experience of tracking EMG for about 16 months. The EMG technology has been used largely by medical industries to diagnose various neuromuscular diseases. She also shares what she learned from looking at thousands of hours of muscle activation data.

The Dashboard Of My Life

David de Souza

Six years ago while at a pub with a group of friends, David de Souza decided he wanted to run a marathon on every single continent. He made it his New Year's resolution, but completely failed. So then he decided to be proactive about this goal and started to track his runs. In this video, he discusses how recording his runs helped him understand which days he was motivated to run, what the distance was, and how many miles he ran. Tracking helped him run his first ever marathon in New York City, which led to the development of a dashboard he created to help keep him on track for his earlier goal, in addition to other goals in his life, as well.

My Phone Use Data

Joost Plattel

In 2015, Joost Plattel was very bad at keeping his phone with him at all times, so he started to track his phone use for a year with Moments. Our phones can store data on many things including how much we use them. In this video, he shares what he learned from his phone use data.

Measuring And Predicting Daily Satisfaction

John Cottongim

John Cottingim is 35 years old. He lives in New York City and manages a process automation team. In this video, John discusses how he learned to track, measure, and predict his daily satisfaction by combining automation, visualization and machine learning without any coding.

A Life Of Fractals

Justin Timmer

In 2014, Justin Timmer started tracking himself using a wearable and afterwards an app. Justin actively tracks about 69 variables on a daily basis and has completed a total of 22 experiments on himself. In this video, he talks about the frailty of his life and why he tracks these variables. He wants to know if there are deeper patterns of reasoning behind his life-logging and self-tracking experiments.

Can A Picture Be Worth A Thousand Numbers

Laila Zemrani

Laila has been tracking her weight for a few years, and more recently she began tracking other people's weight and physical variation through her company, Fitnescity. In this video, she talks about her experiment with 3D body models, which is a relatively new way of representing and tracking the human body. Three-dimensional body scanners enable the 3D visualization of the body and the extraction of anthropometric landmarks and measurements.

Mindtrack

Tara Thiagarajan

Tara Thiagarajan has been self-tracking for 22 years. She tracks things like her calories, nutrition, water, exercise, and sleep. In this video, she shares her personal dashboard connecting sleep, diet, water, and brain activity (EEG), showing the patterns of interconnections.

Setting Goals And Holding Myself To Account

Lee Rogers

Lee Rogers is a total data nerd who has collected a few hundred thousand data points over many years. He aggregates his data using various online services. In this video, he shares his lessons learned from his goal dashboarding and annual reporting experiments.

Blood Ketones During Regular Fasting

Mark Moschel

Mark Moschel is experimenting with a Ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting and doing multiple blood ketone testing to measure his ketogenic state. Mark discusses the ease of measuring himself on a ketogenic diet. One can track ketones in the same way one tracks glucose in blood. In this video, Mark talks about how he did his experiment and what he learned.

How Much Carbon Dioxide Do I Emit?

Björn Hedin

Most people’s lifestyles result in far more CO2 emissions than what is sustainable. Bjorn wanted to find out how much carbon dioxide he emits. He began to log his transportation, meals, heating and electricity use, and general consumption by using a combination of tools to track his CO2 emissions. In this video, he discusses what he did and the hard lessons we all must learn that even despite his efforts to not use more than is sustainable, he still lives outside of the range.

High-Frequency Blood Glucose Testing

Gary Wolf

Gary Wolf uses a simple home monitor, FreeStyle Libre Pro, that gives him blood glucose reading every 15 minutes. In this video, he talks about the discovery of an unexplained pattern of nighttime blood sugar spikes.

Sub-Perceptual Psilocybin Dosing

Janet Chang

Janet Chang works in the tech industry in San Francisco. In this video, she discusses how her micro dosing experiment in the last 12 months helped her with productivity, mood, and social anxiety. She shares the data from the experiment with sub-perceptual doses of psilocybin and what she learned.

Improving My Blood Pressure With Anaerobic Interval Training

Siva Raj

Siva Raj noticed his blood pressure rise after he turned 40, which was a wake-up call since he watched his father have three heart attacks in ten years. He then tried to figure out how to normalize his blood pressure, so he began doing anaerobic interval training. In this talk, he shares his success doing the training using Revvo, a small exercise pack.

How Food Tracking Supported Becoming a Vegetarian

Jakob Eg Larsen

Jacob Eg Larsen decided to change his diet to become a vegetarian. To support this change, he decided to track the project that he shares in this video. Through using photos on his smart phone, he was able to document his diet and reflect on the process.

Fish Oil Makes Me Smarter

Richard Sprague

Richard Sprague worked with the late Seth Roberts on a brain reaction time testing application for the iPhone. Seth had a proven theory that certain foods and activities could help his brain be more or less reactive. Seth died suddenly last year, but Richard continued to work on the project and I came up with some interesting things that he shares in this talk -- including whether or not fish oil makes him smarter.

Repairing My Gut After Travel

Mark Moschel

Mark gets giardia while traveling in Ecuador and embarks on a journey to heal his gut. He attempts to discover how giardia and antibiotics impact the health of his gut.

Quantifying with Kids

Victor Lee

Victor Lee discusses his QS project using a range of technologies (fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin) to track kids' activities throughout their days. Lee helps the students work with their data, make visualizations and analyze their results.

Using Heart Rate Variability to Analyze Stress in Conversation

Paul LaFontaine

Paul LaFontaine measured his heart rate variability during meetings to understand what he calls "vapor-lock" -- a relatively important person asking another person a difficult question of which he/she knows the answer to, but is unable to remember it in the moment. Using the HRV measurement was a good way for Paul to capture his stress levels during meetings and investigate how to get through this issue. Through this study, Paul learns a great deal about himself and how to prepare for "vapor-lock" in future meetings.

What's My Indoor Environment Like?

Bob Troia

Bob Troia wanted to better understand the risks and the negative health effects caused by poor air quality, the water he drinks and showers with and different types of electromagnetic radiation that surrounds him.
In this talk, Bob shares with us what he did to track his indoor environment and some very subtle and shocking results with simple solutions (i.e. open a window when you sleep to reduce the Co2) to help keep one's indoor environment healthier.

Measuring My Blood Glucose

Philipp Kalwies

I've been tracking my blood glucose though I'm not a person with diabetes. Here is what I've learned and the difference it has made in my life.

Concussions, Headaches and the Whole30 Elimination Diet

Steven Zhang

Steven Zhang shares his history of tracking and measuring concussions, headaches and sleep patterns along with an intervention he did to improve his sleep. After constantly suffering from headaches, he decided to take action and track them post a concussion the year prior. He used Taplog to collect his data to analyze if he was indeed improving.

Re-Living My Life with Mood Tracking

Kouris Kalligas

Kouris Kalligas used an email-based mood tracking service for several months and never utilized the data in any way until he noticed something that triggered him to look back in time for patterns. In this talk, Kouris shares interesting patterns that help inform his daily life and support his findings that he is overall a happy person.

How I Zapped My Brain With A 9v Battery To Overcome Analysis Paralysis

JD Leadam

JD Leadam presents his personal story of self-tracking that had transformative effects on his life by ultimately rewiring his brain. He shares his self-tracking obsession from analysis paralysis to eventual discovery of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)--an unprecedented tool which provided him with the ability to rewire his brain to lead a less-stressed life.

Improving Mental Focus Through Lifelogging

Justin Lawler

Justin Lawler has struggled remaining focused in school and in work throughout his life and so about a year and a half ago he went on a paleo diet and noticed some real improvements in focus. However, he noticed that he was still having some noticeable mood swings, so he decided to try Quantified Mind to start quantifying his cognitive function and short-term memory. In this talk, he shares his upward trending data and analysis over the past two and a half months.

How Much Does it Cost Me To Choose Organic/Local Food?

Cara Mae Cirignano

To find out how much it costs for me to eat organically and locally, I tracked every single food item purchase for 28 weeks. For each purchase, I identified the price of the conventional, non-organic alternative. The resulting cost difference extrapolated over a year surprised me.

Using Self-Tracking to Hack Musculoskeletal Pain

Bryan Ausinheiler

Bryan Ausinheiler is a doctor of physical therapy, a personal trainer and a bike fitter who has a clinic in Oakland. The clinic is focused on data driven assessment and treatment and accurate measurement as well as wearables and self-tracking. In this talk, he shares his experience as a patient and physical therapist using a specially formatted tracking journal (the "hypochondriac's diary") to reduce the uncertainty about causes and test interventions.

A Year In Running

Valera Vasylenko

After a 2013 breakup, Valera Vasylenko wanted to get back in shape, so he started running and tracking it. He then collaborated with friends to build an interactive tool that allows one to change to the data, like restarting data and to build the realization with the data, not only for himself, but for others too. In this talk, he discusses the new data visualization techniques with his running data that help him learn more from it and see how it changed the way he shares his story.

Dreaming in Numbers

Damien Catani

In 1998, Damien Catani started logging dreams in an effort to reconstruct his life after an intense teenage crisis. Seventeen years and more than 8,000 dreams later, Damien shares the surprise findings made during this quest to rationalize irrationality.

Logging My Beer

Clair Samuel

Clair Samuel has been tracking her beer consumption since 2009. She presents some interesting patterns that emerged over the years regarding the seasonality of her beer selection and the categories of the types of beer she consumes. She also discusses her tracking techniques and how they have evolved over time.

My Life In 40 Variables

Justin Timmer

Justin Timmer has been tracking about 40 variables using apps and wearables since 2013. In this talk, he shares his findings from his data; how tracking himself raises his awareness of things, confronts him with facts and makes him investigate deeper. He also shares what learned about happiness, stress, his phone use, sleep, and many other life-lessons.

My Spreadsheet from Hell

Kathryn McCurdy

Katie McCurdy is a patient and user experience designer and also lives with myasthenia gravis & Sjögren's syndrome. These autoimmune conditions cause involuntarily muscle-weakness to her face, dry eyes, and stomach and joint problems. Because of her conditions, many different things impact how she feels from stress to caffeine, to lack of sleep or whether she has been drinking. In this talk, she discusses the massive spreadsheet she created and also shares what she learned from 18 months of tracking various aspects of her health.

Effect of Ketogenic Diet On Heart Rate Variability

Paul LaFontaine

Paul LaFontaine is the orgainzer of the Denver Quantified Self meetup and he does a lot of experiments on himself, including but not limited to, running electricity through his brain and taking additional supplements to see how his body will react. Because he does a lot of experiments, he decided to run a test on himself. He measured his energy four times a day, during two major changes in food and exercise and then he mapped that against his whole day to see how it affected his energy. He shares his unexpected results with some lessons about his "fight or flight" response.

17 Years of Location Tracking

Stephen Cartwright

Stephen Cartwright has been tracking his latitude, longitude and elevation since 1999. He has almost 150,000 hourly location recordings. He finds that he gets more reliable data from manually logging his location instead of relying on the GPS in his smartphone. In this talk, Steven shows how seventeen years of location tracking has given him a wealth of data to explore in the form of three-dimensional data visualization sculptures, which have been shown at some QS conferences.

Blood vs. Breath

Robert Ness

Robert Ness wanted to test how the Ketonix Sport device for tracking ketone bodies by breath compared to the painful and expensive method of measuring ketones in the blood. Ness gathered a wide range of data while doing a seven day full fast, then a seven day fat-only fast, followed by a normal ketogenic diet.

Can't You See I Was Falling In Love

Shelly Jang

Shelly Jang used GMvault to look through 5 years of Google Chat logs to hunt for signals that she loves only her husband. She looked at whom she messages, the time of a day, and the words she uses. She was able to extract meanings from innocuous metrics like “delay in response” to show whether her or her future husband were “playing games” at the beginning of the relationship. In the talk, she shares what she learned from her project.

Project Faster: Tracking to Improve Cycling Performance

Steve Dean

Steve Dean has been doing triathlons for about 10 years on and off with varying consistency. 2007 was his most active year and he did a lot of self-tracking--which was when he was first introduced to Quantifed Self. He now runs the Quantifed Self group in New York. His last race was in 2012 and it was about 6 1/2 hours long. The last two years, he was racing a lot so he wanted to do something different and ran a QS experiment called Project Faster in sensing, measuring and tracking watts to increase his cycling power output. He ran the experiment for six months. In this talk, he discusses his experiment and what he learned.

How My Life Automation System Quantifies My Life

Tahl Milburn

Tahl Milburn presents LIAM, a life automation system he created. It's a system that gives him a 360 view of his life and its automatic system. He focuses on 9 elements that keep someone happy: physical, mental, spiritual, assets, vocation, interests, experiences, relationships, community. There's no logging, but occasional data correction. He talks about his data and what he has learned about himself using LIAM.

28 Years of Tracking, But What Have I Learned?

Nan Shellabarger

Nan Shellabarger has been tracking her life including her weight, activity and sleep for 28 years. She started tracking her weight since 1998. In this talk, she discusses the ways she is constantly analyzing and visualizing her data in different ways to learn something new about herself.

Tracking After A Stroke: Doctors, Dogs, And All The Rest

Andreas Schreiber

Andreas Schreiber is a scientist at German Space Agency, where he travels a lot, attends a lot of conferences all over the world and has a lot of stress which led him to a stroke in 2009. After his stroke, he started tracking his vital signs, sleep and weight. In this talk, he discusses what he did, his various tracking and other activities that help him stay healthy.

What I learned From Extensive Morning Tracking

Peter Joosten

Peter Joosten is a blogger and he blogs in Dutch about Quantified Self. The main part of his blog is on his monthly experiments. He tries something new every month. There are three categories, sometimes he stops doing things, sometimes he introduces new things, and sometimes he try to optimize certain things. For the last two years, he ran these month-long experiments that have taught him about what affects how he feels in the morning. He looks at sleep quality, room temperature, heart rate, and heart rate variability. In this talk, he shares what he has learned from his extensive morning tracking.

Building Myself Back Up

Maggie Delano

Maggie Delano hit her head while helping a friend move. She was diagnosed with a concussion and, later, post-concussion syndrome last September. In order for her to heal, she had to give her brain a break from cognitively stimulating activities. In this talk, Maggie discusses how she tracked her progress toward recovery with Habit RPG (recently renamed Habitica) and improved her sleep with Sleepio.

Learning about Biases and Gaps in my Self-Collected Data

Shannon Conners

Shannon has been collecting data on her diet and excercise since high school. In this talk, Shannon discusses how how creating some beautiful graphs using Jump of her diet and fitness data has really helped her to understand her past patterns. It also helped her identify some habits that she really needs to change.

Extreme Productivity

Bethany Soule

Bethany Soule is the co-founder of Beeminder, a commitment tool which she characterizes as “goal-tracking with teeth.” She and Daniel Reeves, the other founder, has spoken on how they tracked the development of the tool and integration it with other QS tools. In this talk, Bethany shares how she was inspired by Nick Winter’s “Maniac Week“, to focus solely on working and sleeping while documenting a person's face and screen with a time-lapse video for a week. She shares what she learned from it--the accomplishments, the failures and the side effects of the project.

Tracking and Improving My Sleep

Daniel Gartenberg

Quantified Self organizer and cognitive science researcher, Daniel Gartenberg, is interested in sleep and his passion is this idea of not just tracking sleep but actually being able to improve sleep. He also makes sleep apps. He started tracking his sleep after his business partner contacted him on a recent scientific finding, where basically one could enhance deep sleep auditory stimulation that replicates the frequency of one's own brainwaves when in deep sleep. In this talk, he shares his tips on tracking and improving his sleep.

The Art of Self-Tracking

Alberto Frigo

In this talk, Alberto discusses about the art of self-tracking, featuring works from international artists who use personal data tracking techniques in their artistic practices. He shares examples of self tracking from the following international artists: Janina Turek, Stephen Cartwright, Katherine Denatsio and Brian House. The artists' work varies from turning data into 3D sculptures to musical notation interpreted by cello players. Alberto shares his deep admiration and enthusiasm for these inspiring artists.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Correlations

Eric Jain

Eric Jain has been collecting a bunch of data including step counts, calories burned, sleep patterns, and more. He is interested in correlation and finding some external factors in the way how his body works. In this talk, Eric discusses his experiments and what he has learned from it.

Celiac Discovery: Regaining My Health and Well-Being

Katrina Rodzon

At 25 years old, Katrina was overweight and at risk for Type 2 diabetes. She has dietary restrictions for a long time and even started running and did yoga, but she was still very sick. In the talk, she discusses about how she regained her health, as well, as her well-being.

Meta-Effects of Happiness Tracking

Alex Tarling

Alex Tarling starting using the Mappiness app to track his happiness along with other contextual data. Over time the ritual of having to ask himself, “How happy am I?” three times a day started to get him thinking about how he thought about his own happiness and what that meant to him. In this talk, he shares his experience, some of the data he gathered, and how he learned that a slight change in attitude has increased his self-rating of happiness over time.

A Testosterone and Diet Experiment

Maximilian Gotzler

Max Gotzler wasn’t feeling his best during a long German winter. He decided to visit his physician to see if anything might be going on. This included various blood and micro-nutrient tests. When he received his results he noticed that his testosterone levels were on the low-end of the acceptable range. Intrigued by this, he set out to figure out what affects his testosterone levels. Using a variety of self-tracking tools and methods he experimented with diet and lifestyle factors while tracking his testosterone values. In this video, he discusses what he learned from his experiment.

Memory and Learning

Steven Jonas

In 2008, Steven Jonas read an article that pretty much changed his life. It was about about a program called Supermemo, written by Gary Wolf. Supermemo had this promise where it would help you remember 95% of what you’ve learned forever. Steven purchased the program and discovered it really worked. In this talk, he shares the lessons he learned from Supermemo.

Grandma Was A Lifelogger

Kitty Ireland

When Kitty stumbled upon her grandmother’s diaries and started to explore the daily entries, she was struck by similarities with her own life and habits. Kitty is a modern-day lifelogger. She tracks places, events, mood – a variety of different personal data streams. Reading the diaries, Kitty saw that her grandmother used her daily entries as logs – tracking the details of where she went, what she ate, even the boys she kissed. In this talk, Kitty shares what she discovered, and the lessons she learned.

ECG and Activity Monitoring: What Can We Learn?

Maggie Delano

Maggie Delano wanted to see what she would find out if she tracked her electrocardiograms continuously over time. Electrocardiogram is a measurement of ones' heart. A doctor would prescribe you a device that could measure your electrocardiogram when you have any sort of cardiovascular dysfunction. In this talk, she explains what an ECG and activity monitoring is and what she has learned from it.

Data Cartography: The Journey to Existence Mapping

Chris Dancy

For three years Chris has been using low-friction data collection to capture hundreds of elements of his life into a repository for search, visualization and analysis. Two years ago he started incorporating as many events, devices, sensors, applications, and services that he could into his life. Currently he has over 300 systems that simultaneously monitor everything that he does whether it be his home, his work, or his play. Chris realized that his data was starting to look like a unique pattern, like a topographical map. In this video, he talks about his journey to existence mapping.

A Photo Every Minute: One Year Later

Rob Shields

Rob Shields has been wearing a camera phone around his neck that takes photos every minute. He has been doing this since August of last year. In this video, one year later, he talks about what has changed, what’s new, the things that have been working, and some of the stuff that haven't been working. He also shares some data from his experiment.

Tracking 10,000 Running Miles Over 10 Years

Julie Price

Julie has been tracking her running mileage for the past 10 years while training for 15 marathons. While training and learning about running she began to pick up new “rules of thumb” to help guide her training and performance, but something was still missing. How did she know that she was sticking to these rules? Was there any evidence that training was working or that she was accomplishing what she wanted to? In this talk, she iterates her planning, tracking and training, and discusses what she learned.

How I Lost 200 Lbs.

Richard Harrison

Richard used to weigh 435 pounds and has been obese all of his life. He's tried all sort of diets over the years and nothing seemed to work until 2009 when he did something a little bit different. In this talk, he discusses how he lost a lot of weight by making small changes to his diet and his lifestyle guided by reflective writing on his blog.

A 30 Day Trial of the Slow Carb Diet

Dan Dascalescu

As a busy entrepreneur, Dan Dascalescu didn't have time to go to the gym, but he wanted to look a certain way. After trying a few different ways of dieting, Dan decided to give the The Slow Carb Diet (popularized by Tim Ferriss in 4-Hour Body) a try because it doesn’t require the gym and it’s pretty simple to follow. In this talk, he discusses his data from a 30-day trial of the Slow Carb Diet.

Hacking Habits

Mark Leavitt

In 2007, Mark Leavitt found out at 57 that he had heart disease, like his father, uncle, and grandfather. In this talk, he shares how he uses data to hack his habits and what he learned from the experiment. The results of his data helped him change a majority of his lifestyle habits.

Low Friction Personal Data Collection

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki has been tracking various aspects of this life for years – specifically location, weight, and sleep. These are the three things Aaron has managed to track consistently. Combining these data sources helped him learn new things about himself. In this video, he talks about his tracking practices and his thoughts on why a personal data server is an important tool.

We Never Fight on Wednesday

Paul LaFontaine

When Paul LaFontaine was a soldier in 1991, he was very alert and quite calm. However, in 2006, after a negotiation he felt physical panic. So he was interested in how he reacted to certain situations and devised a study to capture his reactions. In this video, he talks about how six months of tracking mood alongside events, time, and people gave him some surprising lessons about conflict and other topics.

Tracking my Blood Anticoagulation Drug

Robert Rothfarb

Rob Rothfarb, a proactive patient with a couple of different health conditions became interested in tracking his blood at home, in addition to activity tracking and tracking his weight. In this video, he talks about tracking his blood anticoagulation drug intake and monthly INR values.

100 Days of Summer

Konstantin Augemberg

Konstantin Augemberg, known as the Measured Me guy, was on a personal quest to develop his own system for self-tracking, life-logging and self-experimentation. In this video, he talks about the self-tracking experiment he conducted this summer that lasted for 100 days using a system for continuous capture and optimization of his everyday life.

Can a 5’7” Person Learn to Dunk a Basketball?

Mark Moschel

Mark Moschel wanted to learn how to dunk a basketball over the summer. He shares how he did it, how he improved himself and what he learned. He also shares the frustrations, challenges, and the progress he's made.

Carbless in Seattle

Adrienne Andrew Slaughter

Adrienne Andrew Slaughter was testing out a new diet that included carbohydrate restriction. She started to notice she was feeling tired and slow during her commutes and wondered if her dietary changes had anything to do with it. Luckily, Adrienne was tracking her commutes and her diet and was able to run a detailed data analysis to find out what happens when she goes carb-less. In this talk, she shares what she did, how she did it, and what she learned.

A Million Heartbeats

Crt Ahlin

Crt Ahlin is from Slovenia and he studies statistics at the University of Ljubljana. He is also a fan of life logging. Crt became interested in the Quantified Self movement about three years ago when he had some health issues. In this video, he talks about visualizing heart rate data and a possible way to measure daily values with a curve that could also be used as a baseline for comparisons.

A Librarian in Numbers

Debbie Chaves

Debbie Chaves is a science and research librarian at Wilfred Laurier University and was interested in understanding her job and the various demands placed on her time. Using methods she employed previously she set about tracking different aspects of her work. The data she gathered allowed her to advocate for new changes and policies within her library. In this video, Debbie explains her tracking, what she found, and what she was able to accomplish.

Life in the Fast Lane: Learning from Vitals

Stephen Zadig

Steve Zadig is the co-founder and COO of Vita Connect. He is 63 years old, about 10 pounds overweight and is a moderate QS'er. In this video, he discusses what he learns from his vitals from racing cars. He believes racing cars requires a lot of focus. Steve shares data from a race and and discuss how he uses it and what it means in his life.

An “Unknown and Incurable Illness”

Damien Blenkinsopp

Damien Blenkinsopp had unexplained issues starting in 2006. With excersize and a paleo diet he started to improve, but in 2012 he began to experience more strange symptoms. He started data tracking for about 8 years of his life. In this video, he talks about the diagnosis and his learnings from tracking.

Tinké: Monitoring Fitness Levels and Relaxation Indexes

Juliana Chua

Juliana Chua of Zensorium is a woman in her early 30s who enjoys working, but is not fond of exercising. There are three things she wanted to know: 1) how does she relax her mind and body 2) What are her highlights, and 3) What is her stress level. In this video, she talks about how she used Tinké and what she learned from using it.

Washing My Eyelids

Steve Dean

Steve Dean is the co-organizer of New York City QS meetup group. He is an avid self-tracker, using different methods and tools to understand his life. About three years ago Steve started to experience inflammation along his eyelids. He was diagnosed with atopic dermatitis and was prescribed a treatment regiment. He created a Google Form to track his symptoms and treatments he was doing every day. In this talk, Steve shares what he learned and how tracking finally helped him understand how to get everything under control.

How Not to Fall

Sara Riggare

Sara Riggare has Parkinson’s Disease and has been using self-tracking to better understand herself. Her most troublesome Parkinson's Disease symptom is freezing of gait. In this talk, she explains why self-tracking is such a big part of her daily life and how she’s using new tools and techniques to track and improve her gait.

A Four-Year Journal

Morris Villarroel

Four years ago Morris Villarroel was inspired to start writing things down. He started with a simple Muji notebook and begun adding some structure such as daily logs, life events, and review of books and articles he had read. In the process of filling out over 130 journals, his process has evolved to include journaling about other important aspects of his life. In this talk, Morris explains his journaling in detail, gives a few examples of how he’s able to analyze the data he’s tracking in his journals, and explains how this process has improved his reflection and preparation for future events.

A Goal For Each Month

Florian Schumacher

In the beginning of 2014 Florian set himself twelve goals, one for every month. In his Show&Tell he’ll present the achievements in nutrition, fitness, sleep, and productivity that he's made in 2014.

2 years of tracking weight diet and sleep

Randy Sargent

Randy Sargent, a researcher at Carnegie MacMillan University, talks about what he's learned from tracking his weight for over two years.

Optimizing Productivity

Brian Crain

Brian has been thinking about his productivity since 2011. He tried a few different methods, but he’s found that using the pomodoro technique has been very helpful in understanding and improving his work. Watch his talk to learn what he found by tracking the number of pomodoros he completes each day and what new methods he’s using to make sure he gets things done.

Connecting my Mind and Body

Juliana Chua

Juliana discusses her steps, sleep, stress and also her fitness level. She shares how she did it and what she she has learned. She uses data from her activity, sleep, heart rate, and stress sensors to explore the effects of mindfulness on her physical condition.

Tracking Media Consumption

Ian Forrester

Ian Forrester, a senior Firestarter at BBC R&D, is working on a project of media consumption - what you see and what you consume. In this talk, he shares why they are interested in tracking media consumption. He also shares the different method and tools that they used on the project.

Running Cold - Does it Burn More Calories?

Nick Alexander

Nick Alexander wanted to find out if running in colder weather would make him burn more calories. So he wanted to try and keep everything the same as much as he could, including his route, the duration it took him to run, and the clothes he wore throughout the year. What he found out was that the more fit one becomes, he/she burns fewer calories doing the same activity which could also be a compounding. In this talk, Nick explains his experimental setup and what he found after tracking over 30 runs and crunching the numbers.

50,000 Observations Later

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen

To better understand his allergies and his overall health, Thomas began tracking a discrete phenomena, his sneezes. By plotting them over time and then exposing himself to other data like sleep, travel, and diet he’s been able to start to understand himself better. Watch his talk below to see what Thomas learned, and how he thinks about his process of continuous learning.

Tracking (and Hacking) My Glucose

Bob Troia

Over the course of about seven months Bob Troia took daily fasting glucose readings each morning. He started off just getting a normal baseline of readings and then after 30 days started taking Oxaloacetate. In this talk, he shares his experiment and what he learned.

A Year of Diabetes Data

Doug Kanter

Doug Kanter is a Type-1 diabetic who’s been thinking about how self-tracking influences his diabetes control for a few years. While in graduate school at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU he started experimenting with visualizations that helped him understand his blood sugar and insulin dosing. In 2012 he began adding more data to his exploration in order to better understand how diet played a role in his diabetes self-management. Watch this great talk to learn more about Doug’s journey and his ongoing diabetes project.

How Six Months of Tracking Everything Increased my Awareness

David El Achkar

When David El Achkar made a big change in his life, transitioning out of his consultant role, he started wondering how the lack of daily structure would affect how he spent his time. He decided to tackle this question and start tracking his activities. In the video that follows David explains how he accomplishes this by using a Google calendar and a specific formatting system. He also elaborates on a few key insights about where his time goes and what he’s learned about his productivity.

8,000 Screen Hours

Robert Macdonell

For the last six years Robby Macdonnell has been tracking his productivity and how he spends his time on his various computers (home and work) and even how he uses phone. Over those years he’s amassed 8,300 hours of screen time. Watch his great talk to hear what’s he learned about his work habits, productivity and how he’s come to think about time.

Landmines & Zombies

Chris Bartley

Chris Bartley, an engineering consultant was feeling like a zombie. So over the course of 18 months, Chris tried taking supplements and medications and made changes in his diet. He started a spreadsheet with five columns to track his wellness, medications and diet. He saw no improvement and decided to write a thesis on himself. He took the data and decomposed it into indicated variables. He found that it was only a subjective measurement and learned that he does know his own body.

Me and My Log

Cathal Gurrin

Cathal Gurrin is a researcher at Dublin City University and the University of Tsukuba. He’s also an expert in the field of visual and data-driven lifelogging. Since 2006 he’s collected over 14 million passively collected images from different wearable cameras. In addition to his other sensors, and he’s nearing over 1TB per year of self-tracking data. In this talk, Cathal describes what he’s learned over the last eight years and what he’s working on in his research group including search engines for lifelogging as well as privacy and storage issues.

A Lazy Workout

Justin Timmer

Justin Timmer is a student in human movement science and a fitness instructor. He was interested in exploring what he could do to increase his strength. Rather then starting with a typical strength training program Justin wanted to test if isometric muscle contraction alone could increase his strength. This type of exercise involves just squeezing the muscles without using any weight. He even went so far as to only target one side of his body so that he could test against his non-squeezing muscle groups. In this talk, presented at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference, Justin explains his process and the results of this 4-week experiment.

Solving A Food Allergy Mystery

Suzanne Lueder

Sue Lueder had a mystery stomach ailment that started after a vacation to Spain in 2011. After returning from her trip she was beset by consistent and frequent burping attacks. After visiting her physician and receiving a diagnosis for heart burn, which she didn't trust, she began to track her attacks and her diet. In this talk, presented at QS 2013 Global Conference, Sue shows how she tracked her symptoms and used the data to make sense of this mystery food allergy.

Three Years of Logging my Inbox

Mark Wilson

Mark Wislon notices that his inbox correlates directly with his stress level. After passively tracking this for three years, he decides to actively shift how he sees his inbox account and learns how he's controlled (and been controlled by) this stream of angst. He also discovers a very important life lesson: he's addicted to email.

Does Diet Affect My Sleep?

Denise Lorenz

Denise - a very happy, easy, and a carefree girl was having sleeping problems so she started a sleep experiment. In this talk, Denise shows a year’s worth of data from her diet and sleep experiment and finds while food matters a little, other things matter more.

Fit 50s, Sound 60s

Maria Benet

In her early 50's, Maria was overweight, out of shape with bad knees and depressed. She was on meds so she made changes to her life, she started tracking her activity levels, weight, and food intake with wearable devices and apps. She has been tracking for almost 10 years, developing strategies for improving and maintaining her health as she ages.

Science, Smell, Fashion

Jenny Tillotson

Jenny Tillotson is a researcher and fashion designer who is currently exploring how scent plays a role in emotion and psychological states. As someone living with bipolar disorder, she’s been acutely aware of what affects her own emotions states and has been exploring different methods to track them. In this talk, presented at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference, Jenny discusses her new project, Sensory Fashion, that uses wearable tracking technology and scent and sensory science to improve wellbeing.

Analyzing My Weight and Sleep

Kouris Kalligas

Like anyone who has ever been bombarded with magazine headlines in a grocery store checkout line, Kouris Kalligas had a few assumptions about how to reduce his weight and improve his sleep. But data from his wireless scale, diet tracking application, activity tracking devices, and sleep app revealed surprising results.

Deciphering My Brain Fog

Mark Drangsholt

One year ago Mark found himself in a mental fog, battling the "tip of my tongue" problem. Using his experience with single subject research design and self-tracking he tackled this tough issue head on. One of the benefits of long-term self-tracking is that one builds up a toolbox of investigatory methods that can be drawn upon when medical adversity hits.

Goalmap: All Your Life Goals In One Place

Damien Catani

Damien Catani had a well-rounded life with sports, arts, and intellectual activities, but started to lose his balance when he started working at a bank. So he started a spreadsheet to track his life goals, which had became part of how he manages his life. In this talk, he presents Goalmap, a digital goal setting and goal tracking platform that helps you set, track, and reach all types of goal in all fields of life from conception to completion.

Quantified/Unquantified

Nancy Dougherty

Nancy Dougherty has been with involved with Quantified Self for numerous years. She likes to build her own sensors so she can do experiments around emotions, mindfulness and exercise. She even build tools for the Quantified Self as she believes in the movement and the idea as self-knowledge, self-empowerment, and personalized medicine. About a year ago, she got ill. In this video, Nancy digs a bit deeper into her personal experiences when she gave up tracking while maintaining what she calls, “the QS mindset.”

High Carbohydrate Diet

Greg Pomerantz

Greg Pomerantz was curious about the effect of carbohydrate intake on his various health indicators. After eating a low carbohydrate diet for a few years Greg wanted to see what happened if he reversed course and switched to a high carbohydrate diet (mostly fish and rice). Watch this quick talk, filmed at the New York QS Meetup group, to see what he learned.

Data Exploration With Fluxtream/BodyTrack

Anne Wright

Anne Wright talks about the value of aggregating data and how Fluxtream has been designed to allow people to explore combined data streams to support reflecting on their situation over time. She talks about the importance of supporting people in learning and adapting the culture and practices of self-tracking to investigate their own situation, including examples of people she's worked with have who have come to useful insights through such a process. She also talks about what data providers need to supply in order to support this sort of ongoing incremental reflection.

30 Days of Rejection Therapy

Mark Moschel

To reduce his fear of uncomfortable social situations, Mark Moschel accepts a challenge by his friend to participate in what he called “Rejection Therapy.” Could he go thirty days with the goal of being rejected at least once per day? Watch this entertaining talk to hear what Mark learned by tracking his experiences.

What I Learned By Building

Dawn Nafus

Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist, reflects on some observations of what self-trackers actually do when they make sense of data. Dawn's observations led her to ask: what tools might support more diverse ways of working with data? This short talk describes what she's learned while engaging and building tools for the QS community.

Long-term Nutrient Logging and Systematic Analysis

Alan Gale

Alan Gale is a chief biomedical engineer for Biologic Health. Alan became interested in nutrients when he was an undergraduate student at CAL while working for a health food store. In the talk, he shares his experiences and discovery. He learned that we can increase our average lifespan by reducing the risk of the major causes of death like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes through optimized nutrition. He also learned that we can increase our maximum lifespan, which is defined as the average lifespan of the longest living 10% of the population, by reducing caloric intake to a point, while again maintaining optimized nutrition.

Keeping Track Of My Personal Development

Juvoni Beckford

Juvoni Beckford discusses how tracking helped him rise above the impoverished area he grew up in in the Bronx. Using mobile apps/services, Juvoni talks about the core areas of tracking that helped him train his intuition to form keystone habits that helped take him where he wanted to go.

Personal Comfort

Stefano Schiavon

Stefano Schiavon is an assistant professor and researcher interested in sustainable building design. As he told us at last month’s Quantified Self meetup in Berkeley, California, “I am Italian. I love architecture. And I think buildings are beautiful.” Stefano and his colleagues have embarked on a series of studies to better understand people’s individual preferences for their environments and they are doing it with QS tools. Watch to learn some of their findings.

Tracking Ketones

Mark Moschel

Mark tracks the ketones in his blood while he follows a ketogenic diet. He compares his findings to a colleague who follows the same diet and learns that their bodies react differently.

Tracking Pregnancy and Baby Growth

Erica Forzani

Erica Forzani tracks her blood glucose levels, physical dimensions, weight, resting metabolic rate, activity, blood pressure and diet throughout her pregnancy to argue many pregnancy and breastfeeding myths.

My Road to Optimal Health and Lifespan

Michael Lustgarten

Michael Lustgarten talks about his plan to achieve the world's longest lifespan through key health metrics. The presentation took place at the Boston Quantified Self meetup on June 27, 2016.

Exercise: Data-Driven Decisions

Laila Zemrani

Laila Zemrani talks about the vast and often contradictory exercise space and how she found the exercise regimens that were the best fit for her body.

Quantifying My Mental and Experiential State

Tahl Milburn

Tahl Milburn presents LIAM, a life automation system he created. He focuses on 9 elements that keep someone happy: physical, mental, spiritual, assets, vocation, interests, experiences, relationships, community. Looking at his own data, he discovers he spends too much time at home.

Focusing on Life with an Open-Source Artificial Pancreas

Erzsi Szilagyi

Erzsi Szilagyi has Type 1 diabetes and in this talk, she shares with us her journey using the open-sourced artificial pancreas system called "loop." Since using this system, she has freed hours from her day that used to focus on diabetes management and is now able to focus on her actual life as a scientist, cyclist, friend and traveler.

Words for Mood Measurement

Jon Cousins

Jon presented his Words for Mood Measurement self-tracking project at the Bay Area Quantified Self meetup on April 19, 2016. Jon shares his experiments with Word Stem Completion tasks to better understand his mood. These exercises are a kind of projective test in which he consults with Dr. Roy Baumeister’s to help understand the psychology behind the tasks.

Productivity and Performance in College

Tiffany Qi

At the QS Bay Area Meetup #40, Tiffany Qi shares four years of data that shows how she spent her time at UC Berkeley. She asks important questions about productivity, performance and searches for any correlation between time spent and its impact on her success at UCB. She also comes to some conclusions about what is a successful student career.

Managing My Time with A Dashboard View

Eric Mann

Eric Mann realized at a point in his life that he didn't feel he was getting what he needed out of life, so he began tracking his time spent in his life. He pulled a bunch of data together from his calendars and put it into a spreadsheet to analyze. He then went a step further and built an app to visualize his data and also set goals so he can actually see if the time he is spending is working towards a goal or not.

Using Big Data to Manage Health

Michael Snyder

Mike Snyder runs a lab at Stanford focused on finding predictable patterns of potential disease or sickness in ones body by using a huge amount of data. Basically, they are looking for an individual’s healthy state at a personal level and what happens when they transition into other states (i.e. sickness or disease). Mike shares his personal story and data of going through 10 viral infections, Lyme disease and a bike accident. Then, he discusses the sequencing of his genome, which predicted many things that matched his family history, including that he was at risk for type 2 diabetes that he got during the course of the study.

Do Probiotics Affect My Gut?

Karl Heilbron

Karl Heilbron wanted to learn about his gut microbiome, so he took a few tests using uBiome. After taking a series of tests, he changed his diet and introduced probiotics, that ended up having an opposite effect in his gut, contradicting their purpose. In this talk, he shares his story and interesting discoveries.

Fight For Your Right To Recess

Cantor Soule-Reeves

Cantor Soule-Reeves is an 8 year old who goes to Richmond Elementary School in Portland, Oregon. The students of Richmond Elementary get 20 minutes of recess every day, however, when it rains recess is canceled. And, it rains a lot in Portland—about 164 days a year on average. Cantor started tracking his steps on rainy days and sunny days and based on his data, he’s able to prove that every canceled recess takes about 600 steps out of his day. In this project, Cantor and Bethany (his mother) talk about the project and their plan to take the information to the school in hopes to change his elementary school’s policy for rainy-day restrictions.

Cholesterol Variability: Hours, Days, And My Ovulatory Cycle

Whitney Erin Boesel

After having a baby recently, Whitney learned that her cholesterol was unusually high and she became curious to understand what the cause was. Given that one side of her family genetics has very high cholesterol, she wondered if it was finally time she had to stop eating so much cheese, or if rather, it was simply high due to having a baby. Using a CardioChek at home, she tested a fairly unusual hypothesis: if she does absolutely nothing, will her cholesterol get better all by itself? After getting more data points than most likely anyone else ever, she happily discovers that her cholesterol did just get better the further away she grew from birth.

Weight and exercise tracking with the Hacker Diet

Jodi Schneider

Jodi Schneider talks about tracking weight and exercise using the Hacker Diet model. She discusses what she did, how she did it and what she learned from it. She also shares her experiences with the tools she used and what she learned from them.

How I use RescueTime

Buster Benson

Buster Benson of Habit Labs likes to experiment with productivity, among other things. He uses RescueTime to see which apps and websites he spends the most time on each week. The winners are his text editor (for coding) and Gmail. In the video, Buster talks about the ease of different kinds of tracking, from passive to binary to active entry, and previews some some Habit Labs apps.

Arterial Stiffness

Renate Zwijsen

Renate Zwijsen talks about arterial stiffness, some new insights and biomarkers for cardio physical health. Arterial stiffness refers to the elasticity of the arteries, as one ages so does his/her blood vessels. About half of the people suffering from heart disease have normal blood pressure and normal cholesterol and it's likely linked to arterial stiffness, which is a strong independent predictor of heart attack and stroke.

Feedback and awareness: form Paleo to creativity

Marco van Heerde

Marco van Heerde is 35 years old and has been surfing for many years and is still not really good at it. In this video, he talks about the non-tech and low-tech experiments he did to become a better surfer and healthier. He learned that Quantified Self really creates awareness and feedback and because of the tracking, one creates awareness of every day decisions.

The Human Face of Big Data

Rick Smolan

Rick Smolan is a photographer who used to work for National Geographic and Time Magazine. About every 18 months through his company, Against All Odd Productions, he gets together with his heroes, his peers and some young photographers. They fly a hundred photographers around the world as well as writers, animators, and directors and they do projects to take a deep look at topics. In this video, he presents "The Human Face of Big Data" project, it is designed to demonstrate how real time sensing and visualization of data has the potential to change every aspect of life on earth.

Decisions and Experimentation in the Quantified Self

Ian Eslick

Ian Eslick spent the last four years thinking about variations on how do we disseminate what we’ve learned. When he got involved with QS, he was on pause with his Ph.D. and was working with rare disease communities and thinking about how patients can influence the research and development process. He realized he could bring these two worlds together. He shares his story about what he did, how he did it, and what he learned.

Valerie Aurora on Tracking Street Harassment

Valerie Aurora

Valarie moved to San Francisco when she was 29 and she was not prepared for the city life. She was really freaked out by the trash on the streets, by the way the taxi drivers drove, and how expensive everything was. But the thing that freaked her out the most was street harassment. Street harassment is any action or comment between strangers in public places that is disrespectful, unwelcome, threatening, or harassing and is motivated by gender or sexual orientation. She was surprised with how many times she was harassed while walking around. To better understand what was going on she started tracking these instance.

Sleep and Food: an experiment in progress

Tim Vink

Tim Vink is a student at Delft University of Technology, Holland. In this talk, he shares how he got started with the Quantified Self movement. He also discusses his 40 day experiment on sleep and what he learned. Currently, he's studying food because he found that food effects your clarity levels.

Social Studies

Eri Gentry

Eri Gentry works at Genomera as the Community Manager. Genomera is a collaboration platform for group health science, enabling participants to design and operate scientific health studies. In this video, Eri talks about some of the social studies that they did and what they are working on for the future.

Naming the Demon

David Goldstein

David Goldstein does research and consulting, for political research and market research. He was diagnosed with spinal cord cancer in 2001 and has had two surgeries, a month of radiation, paralysis, and tones of his back. In 2008, he had a heart attack and two stints put in. In this video, he talks about how working with Mymee reduced his pain, his weight, and help improved his life by restoring a sense of control over what has been chaos.

Debugging My Allergy

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen is the co-founder of Mymee. He's made a lot of observations of his own health conditions specifically his grass pollen allergy. In this video, he talks about how he has debugged his allergy for the past four years, and shares his big breakthrough this summer and where he was able to enjoy the smell of grass again.

Experiments in Self-Tracking

Laurie Frick

Laurie Frick is a data artist trying to figure out how to make art from self-tracking data, make it beautiful, meaningful, and give it away. Her journey started four years ago. In this video, she talks about her experiments, including tracking everything for 900 nights and her experimenting with creating hand drawn patterns on an iPhone.

My Father, a Quantified Diabetic

Stefan Hoevenaar

Stefan Hoevenaar’s father had Type 1 Diabetes. As a chemist, he was already quite meticulous about using data and those habits informed how he tracked and made sense of his blood sugar and insulin data. In this talk, Stefan describes how his father kept notes and hand-drawn graphs in order to understand himself and his disease.

For me doing is a form of knowing: triggering my actions with data

Denis Harscoat

Denis Harscoat is a co-founder of Did This, an action logging tool. In this video, he talks about his interest in wanting to write a book and what he learned tracking his actions.

Walk All of Manhattan

Alastair Tse

Alastair Tse, an iOS developer at Google, recently moved to New York, and had a goal of walking every street in Manhattan. He tried a few different approaches to tracking his walks but nothing panned out, so he decided to make his own app that doesn’t use GPS or drain his phone battery. In the talk, Alastair shares his adventures in working towards the goal, and the interesting things he learned about himself from the experience.

Measuring the Brain with Inside

Adam Laughlin

Adam Laughlin has a background in psychology and software developments and has worked with various non-profits over the years. In this talk, he discusses the simple concept about measuring more than just happiness, a concept introduced to him by the founder of Next Stage Evolution.

A Life of Firsts

James Norris

James Norris is on a quest to experience life as much as possible. He has been tracking life events for 15 years. In this talk, presented at the Washington DC QS meetup group, James describes how he tracked many significant experiences and what he's learned from 1,500 of "firsts."

Quantifying What To Wear

Andrew Paulus

In this talk, Andrew Paulus shares how he used self-tracking to measure the impact of weather on his choice of clothes. Andrew's morning habits included checking the weather on his phone in order to decide what to wear on that day. He then became curious about how efficient this process was, so he began tracking his choice of clothes and assessment at the end of the day. He shares his findings and process with the QS NY Meetup.

Tailored Meals

Jason Langheier

Jason Langheier is the CEO and founder of Zipongo and a Qualified Selfer. In this talk, he discusses how to design a behavioral economic dashboard using your Quantified Self data. He shares how QS data can be used to actually change the way you live despite the hustle and bustle of every day life.

Tracking a Memetic Diet

Robert DeSaulniers

When memes, symbols, and ideas get transmitted to each other through gestures and rituals, they are in fact what makes up our life, perception, and thoughts. Robert began to wonder where did all the memes come from, and how did they get inside of him? In this talk, he shares his journey of his memetic diet; brain washing himself from these memes, and ideas.

Tracking over Time

Steve Dean

Steve Dean discusses what he's learned from tracking different aspects of his life for over a decade. Twenty years ago, while getting his MFA in graduate school, he did an archaeological dig on himself and expressed it through various forms and objects he made. In this talk, Steve shares his mixture of self-disclosure, self-revelation, and lots of self-doubt throughout his journey.

Knowledge Tracking

Roger Craig

Roger Craig discusses his knowledge tracking for the television game show, Jeopardy. His goal was to track and quantify a learner on the body knowledge. To do this, a few years ago he designed a private web tool for himself and invited his friends to track his performance.

Why Annual Reporting

Lee Rogers

Lee Rogers has been collecting data about himself for over three years. Daily check-ins, movements, and other activities of his life are captured by automatic and passive systems and tools. What makes Lee a bit different than most is that he’s set up a personal automation system to collect and make sense of all that data. A big part of that system is creating an annual report every year that focuses on his goals and different methods to display and visualize the vast amount of information he’s collecting. In this talk, Lee explains his data collection and why he values these annual snapshots of his life.

My experience with a smartphone brainscanner

Jakob Eg Larsen

Jakob Larsen and his team in the Mobile Informatics Lab at the Technical University of Denmark have developed a way to build a real-time 3-D model of your brain using a smartphone and the Emotiv EPOC game controller headset. In this ignite talk, Jakob describes his experience with a smartphone brain scanner, and how the fourteen sensors of his mobile EEG device rival a traditional lab EEG setup.

A Diabetic's Experiment with Self Quantification

Brooks Kincaid

Brooks Kincaid, a 29 years old cyclist, is into being fit. He is also a co-founder of Imprint which develops battery technology to print customize, thin, flexible, rechargeable batteries that can be used in a variety of small portable electronic devices like Med Tech devices and wearable technology, with potential self-quantification applications. Brooks is also a type 1 diabetic. In this talk, he shares his experiment as a diabetic with self quantification.

Playing with my Breath

Olivier Janin

Olivier Janin works at Ubisoft in France and for years he was so stressed that he couldn't perform his best, he lost self-control, and couldn't enjoy his life fully. Five years ago, his friend Sebastian talked to him about biofeedback breathing training exercises, which is used to relax the user. In this talk, he presents his personal experience on how he quantified his stress, and the benefits he gained by training and playing with his breath.

Debugging My Allergy

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen

Thomas Chistiansen of Mymee spent three years using a QS approach to reduce his allergies. He recorded his symptoms, intake of food, water, and supplements, as well as sleep, urination, and elimination. Through his careful 9,4000 observations, Thomas has been able to get rid of the eczema on his hands and can now manage through allergy season without any medication. In the talk, he discusses about how his allergies change with traveling, how he has changed his diet, and other interesting insights.

Hour-Tracking for Priority Optimization

Catherine Hooper

To make sure she is living by her priorities, Catherine Hooper has been tracking how she spends every hour of every day for the past 3 years. She defines her priorities, turns them into actions, then schedules them. Each week, Catherine sits down with her calendar, looks at what she already has on her schedule, and first decides whether these things fit within her priorities. After canceling any things that don’t fit, she adds in the actions that are important to her, in order of importance, as well as supporting actions that need to surround them. In this talk, she explains in details how she prioritize things and how she was able to say no to important things.

QS Adventures with my Kids

Bill Schuller

Bill started tracking his exercise and weight in 2010. His preschool-aged son, began to imitate Bill’s tracking behavior, regularly stepping on the scale, not to watch his weight, but to just check his numbers. Bill then designed tracking games for him and his son. One of them involved putting things away in the house while tracking steps and gaining “clean-up points.” In this talk, he shares more stories about how he and his children play with self-tracking.

Cartographies of Vigilance

Josh Berson

A couple years ago, Josh Berson broke his foot and at first he thought it would bring him distress. Instead, it gave him a chance to explore the arrhythmic quality of our movements, and how the arrhythmic quality of movement over a number of timescales, from a tenth of a second to days, seasons, and years. In this talk, he shares how he got from self-observation to the view in order to really understand our rhythms of activity at rest and motor readiness or motor vigilance.

Quantified Curiosity

Amy Robinson

Amy Robinson is curious. That curiosity led her to think very deeply about her curiosity. What was she curious about? Where do her ideas come from? What inspires her? In this talk, Amy takes us through a really unique method for quantifying her curiosity and what she’s learned so far.

Sophia (w/ Richard Sachs)

Karen Herzog

In this talk, Karen Herzog and her husband, Richard Sachs present an incredible story of their late daughter, Sophia. At 10 months old, Sophia was diagnosed with Niemann-Pick Disease, a rare lysosomal storage disease that affects only 8-10 children in the world at any one time. Karen and Richard share their own model of integrative care--they opened their home to a wide community, kept detailed collaborative records of Sophia in a Binder of Purpose, and even started their own clinical trial of at their house.

QS Tools for Military Style Training

Troy Angrignon

Troy Angrignon wanted to prepared for military-styled events, but didn't think he was up for it. He wanted to be fit, capable, skilled and be able to do service. In this talk, he discusses how he used QS tools to help him train.

The Weight of Things Lost

Kaiton Williams

Kaiton Williams is a PhD student at Cornell University in the department of Information Science. Over the last few years, he’s been interested in how people use technology to understand and create the stories of themselves. In this talk, he discusses his experience with self-tracking and the mental and social tension inherent in the numerical definition of life.

Improving Time Management

Ryan Floyd

Ryan Floyd moved to San Francisco three years ago. He manages an investment fund and invests in publicly listed stock in countries like like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Rwanda. About a year and a half after he started his fund, he decided to take on new investors, but didn't want to spend too much time on marketing. So, he broke his work time down in different intervals and started tracking. In this talk, Ryan talks about what he's learned from tracking his time for work.

input/output

Robert Carlsen

Robert Calrsen wanted to lose a bit of weight, to get back to his days when he was an amateur bike racer. In this talk, he shares his weight tracking experience that he has been engaged in for the last 90 days or so. The experience is a direct relationship between input/output and body weight. It's a weight management plan based on small behavioral changes supported by several internet connected appliances and apps.

Lessons From Food Tracking

Sara Cambridge

Sara Cambridge is in her last semester of graduate School of Information. Sarah started tracking food to determine how much raw food she was eating and encourage herself to eat more. She used the Eatery, a crowd sourcing helpfulness rating app to help with her tracking. In this talk, she discusses the lessons she learned from food tracking.

Of Trivial Value? Lessons From Using SuperMemo

Steven Jonas

After receiving a link to a Wired article written by Gary Wolf and a software (in its 15th version) by Polish computer scientist and biologist named Piotr Wasniack, Steven bought the software and found out how it actually works. The program helps their user to develop some sort of super human memory. In this talk, Steven discusses the lessons from using SuperMemo, he describes using spaced practice to learn things and increase curiosity.

New Media Medicine

John Moore

John Moore has a biomedical engineering background and became interested in medicine. However after practicing for years, he quit partly because he was frustrated and kind of embarrassed with the way medicine was practiced. He felt people weren't involved enough in the process. In this talk, he discusses about the work that he and his team are doing, trying to improve the healthcare experience using technology that allows patients to play a bigger role in crafting their own treatment.

28 Hour Day

Joe Betts-LaCroix

Joe Betts-LaCroix is a bit of a procrastinator and he gets obsessed on projects and he doesn't like to let it go, end up staying up later than he should which leads to sleep loss. So he started an experiment with a 28-hour day. In this talk, he describes in engaging detail how he set up a tent in a crawlspace under his house, how his family reacted to the experiment, and what he has learned from it.

Happsee

Vik Paruchuri

About three months ago, Vik Parachuri was in a situation where he thought he was unhappy. He was working a lot and didn't know how to fix his mood. Wanting to measure his happiness and mood to improve it, he tried a lot of measurement tools, android apps, and web pages, but most of them did not meet his needs. He then went on to create an app called Happsee, which collects data using smartphone sensors to quantify and track happiness. In this talk, he discusses the app and what he has learned from it.

Online Activity Aggregation

Beau Gunderson

In this talk, Beau Gunderson shares a way to bring all of your disparate data sets, from Facebook to Twitter to Foursquare to Zeo to Fitbit to Runkeeper, together in one collection to be accessed through simple APIs. It’s part of an open source development effort called The Locker Project. The goal basically is to be able to see new patterns and correlation by bringing these sources of data together. Beau shares what he learned about himself and the different questions he has about his data.

QS+1: Tracking My Friend's Trading Performance

Ewart de Visser

Ewart de Visser has a friend who was tired of working. In the summer of 2010, his friend took an expensive course with the experts who made a living from currency exchange trading. His friend started to trade for a couple of months after taken the course, but by the end of 2010, he was losing. So Ewart decided to start tracking his friend's performance in a Google sheets. In this talk, Ewart de Visser shares how he tracked his friend's FOREX trading performance and what he has learned from it.

The Enlightened Consumer

Natty Hoffman

Natty Hoffman is a finance geek and has tracked all of her financial transactions over the past 14 years. She worked as a consultant for several large companies helping them track their financial data and budget their expenses and she wanted to implement these tools to her own personal finances. In this talk, she discusses her experiment in trying to do better personally on her finances.

Daily Lipids Testing

Aaron Rowe

Aaron Rowe is a biochemist and researcher. When he realized that his lifestyle was leading him towards an unhealthy future, he designed and tested an intervention to lower his cholesterol through nutritional supplements. In this talk, Aaron describes his testing methods and his results from testing for 12 consecutive days, 12 hours before eating. He also explains what he learned about himself and the various supplements.

Putting Numbers to Sleep

Maria Benet

Maria Benet has been tracking her sleep since July, 2014. She wanted to track her sleep so she can learn more about her sleep patterns. A good night’ sleep makes her positive, productive, and active. A night with little sleep leaves her gloomy, sluggish, but it can also inspire her to write lugubrious poetry or to explore the finer points on a pessimistic outlook on life. In this talk, she explores her data to see what affects her sleep quality and whether or not she can trust the data or her own perception.

Learning from Gratitude

Dan Armstrong

In this talk, Dan Armstrong shares how keeping a gratitude list every day for the past two years has changed his habits, actions and outlook on life. Every morning, he writes down five things that he's grateful for, five things that happened in the last day and five things that he is feeling right then. When he shared this talk, he collected over 3000 items on the list.

Memorizing My Days

Steven Jonas

During the past year, Steven Jonas tried to memorize the daily stuff of his life. To do this, he used a tool that is called Supermemo. It’s a piece of software and it uses a technique that is called spaced repetition. Basically, it's an intelligent flashcard system, to help him remember the interesting things that happen to him during the day. In this talk, he shares how he thinks about memory and what is possible to remember about one's own life.

History and Future of QS Visualization

Indhira Rojas

Indhira Rojas is a visual and interaction designer. She is also a teacher at CCA California College of the Arts in San Francisco where she teaches at the Interaction Design department. In this talk, she and Daniel share visual experiments by visual artists and how they are looking to expand their visual vocabulary, how they represent data and how they represent time. She discusses the history and future of QS visualization.

Heart Rate Variability and Flow

Paul LaFontaine

Paul LaFontaine is on an incredible journey to understand himself, his stress, and how he works through consistent examination of his heart rate variability (HRV). In this talk, Paul describes how he experimented with cognitive testing and recording his HRV to better understand if he was in a Flow state, and how to attain that balance between challenge and skill. He provides some very interesting personal conclusions about the role of belief in one’s own abilities versus actual skills.

Tracking Baby Milestones: Surprising Results Of Bringing Data To Parenting

Morgan Friedman

Morgan Friedman shows the many parenting lessons gleaned from tracking and analyzing his baby's data, even as a sleep-deprived parent. Morgan and his wife began tracking every little thing his baby did as soon after he was born. Soon after, he built an application and had data between 3,000 other parents to compare his baby's development with. By tracking and comparing baby milestones, they found interesting and important patterns and correlation. In this talk, he discusses data, patterns, and surprising parenting advice they learned from tracking.

Personal Science and Other Things

Ian Eslick

Ian Eslick of Vital Reactor presents a short talk about personal data and the scientific process. Access to the methods of science and the scientific process is an important piece of the puzzle, especially as personal data becomes easily captured and more readily understood. Too often, the world of science and research is held up on a pedestal, out of reach for individuals struggling to understand themselves. In this talk, Ian discusses about his personal journey of self-experimentation and how access to the “tools of science” can be highly impactful especially for those battling chronic conditions.

Cholesterol and My Gut Microbiome

Richard Sprague

Richard Sprague has been using uBiome for the last two years. uBiome gives individuals access to sequencing technology to sequence their microbiomes and particularly their gut. In this talk, Richard discusses his biome and shares his data from uBiome. He also discusses some of the research he did about cholesterol and gut microbiome, and shares what he has learned from his study.

How I Measured This Talk

Bill Schuller

Bill Schuller is the organizer of the QS Dallas Meetup. He has given a lot of talks about tracking; however, he isn't satisfied with his talks. So like any good self-tracker, he set out to see what he could learn from tracking and measuring his talk. In this talk, Bill presents some of the tools he uses in real-time to measure himself and the audience.

We Are All Going To Die: How Is Our Digital Life Preserved

Mark Krynsky

Mark Krynsky started a blog about six years ago. On his blog, he wrote about live streaming and impetus and how he was trying to aggregate social data into a single timeline. The blog evolved over time, and it wasn’t just about social data--it was also about life blogging. Since then, he learned about Quantified Self and started thinking about the future of his data, what’s going to happen after he dies? In this talk, Mark discusses digital preservation and how he created an action plan for his digital data after his death.

Elimination Diet + Functional Medicine

Eric Green

Eric Green discusses his experience reversing Crohn's Disease using functional medicine. While doing some research, he found a functional medicinal doctor and was recommended an elimination diet. He discovered that the elimination diet was one of the most helpful strategies that he found to identify trigger foods and train his body to avoid them. He shares how he did it and what he learned from doing it.

30lbs of Family Visits, Races, and Games

Julie Price

Julie Price has been tracking her weight consistently for the last four years. In this talk, Julie discusses what she’s learned about her weight and what correlates with weight gain and weight loss. Specifically, she focuses on the role of family gatherings, exercise and running races, and how different food and dieting methods either helped of hindered her progress.

Tracking Oral Anticoagulation Therapy With INR Journal

Robert Rothfarb

About four years ago, Robert Rothfarb had to start taking medication for the rest of his life. It’s an oral medication with warfarin, also known as Coumadin. Oral Anticoagulation Therapy requires frequent blood testing and a lot of dose adjustments to keep the patient in his/her range for the drug to avoid blood clotting. Robert developed INR Journal to help himself and others follow and track their oral anticoagulant therapy, including dosage and testing, on their mobile devices. In this talk, he discusses tracking Oral Anticoagulation Therapy with his application, INR Journal.

n=1 Personal Informatics

Shaun Wallace

Shaun Wallace is a part-time graduate student at Brown University and was tasked to do a quantified-self project. He discusses his experiment to test the relationship between the food he consumes and his weight change and productivity. The presentation took place at the Boston Quantified Self meetup on April 21, 2015.

Work-Life Balance

Laurie Dillon-Schalk

Laurie Dillon-Schalk is a twin and because of that she has always had a control sample. Laurie works in advertising and tracks all of her billable hours. In this talk, she discusses how she uses her billable hours data to gain better understanding of her work-life balance and build a strategy around that.

April Zero and Me

Anand Sharma

Anand Sharma runs a company called Gyroscope and they use data to tell stories. In 2014, he ran into a problem making sense of all the data he was collecting. He started thinking about his data and how he wanted to use it to understand himself, optimize what he cared about, and help him tell the story of his life through data. So he launched a website, April Zero, where it lets him publicly expose his data and insights. In this talk, he explains what led him to build it and what he learned along the way by publicly sharing his data.

Self Tracking: The Weight of it All

Melinda Watman

Melinda Watman has a company called thefwordfand and has been tracking since she was 3 1/2 years old. In this talk, she discusses about her long history of self tracking and her highs and lows of maintaining her weight. She also discusses the weight of self tracking, what if one suddenly wants to stop but cant.

A Quest for High Fidelity Activity Tracking

Jamie Williams

Jamie got interested in tracking his time 15 years ago when he was a post-doc. He felt unproductive and decided to record the amount of time he was actually getting work done. Seeing the actual data gave him a sense of control but it became tedious so he stopped. In this talk, he shares the project that he has been working on to visualize a timeline of his daily activities and explore his habits through data visualization. He also provides a background of how the project has evolved and what tools he has built to so far.

Data From My Year As A Nomad

Mark Moschel

Last April, Mark Moschel decided to embark on a nomadic, wandering, and homeless journey. He decided to spend a year as a nomad. He had no real reason but was curious to collect data to reflect on it afterwards. In this talk, Mark shares some of his data from being a nomad for 365 days.

Using Self Tracking to Exercise More Efficiently

Laila Zemrani

Laila Zemrani wanted to know what would work best for her when it comes to exercise. So, she started self-tracking to exercise more efficiently. She wanted to understand how her body responds to exercise, what type of exercise works best for her, and how she can use her individual data to train better. In this talk, she shares her experiments and what she has learned from tracking her exercise.

Every Heart Beat

Gordon Bell

Gordon Bell has had two heart attacks, two bypasses, and he is currently on his third pacemaker. In this talk, he shares his experience with tracking his heart beat using his pacemaker. He also shares what he has learned from his pacemaker data.

From April Zero to Gyroscope

Anand Sharma

Last year, Anand Sharma launched a site called April Zero, in which he tracks everything and exposes the details on the internet for everyone else to see. In this talk, he shares what he has learned along the way and what inspired him to start the website. He also shares a startup he's working on with some of his friends, called Gyroscope, which enables individuals to use his visualization and aggregation system to create similar web sites like April Zero.

Tracking Punctuality

Sebastien Le Tuan

Sebastien Le Tuan is a recovering "late-oholic." He is typically always late to friends and family events. One day he had a conversation with his dad that made him realize what effects his tardiness has on his personal and professional life. In this talk, Sebastien describes how he started tracking his punctuality and what he has learned from the process.

Using Genetics to Come Back From Injury

Ralph Pethica

Ralph Pethica works for a startup, Gene Trainer, that builds profiles based on ones' DNA and also has the ability to predict responses to certain types of exercise. This way, one is able to tailor his/her training programs. In this talk, he discusses how he used the same genetics-based methods that he uses to train athletes to help him recover from a serious bike accident.

Learning from Self-Report

Brian Levine

Brian Levine is the co-founder of Tap2, a health analytics firm. Currently he's involved with the creation of a unique self-assessment tool called younlocked. In this talk, Brian discusses some of the interesting things he's found out by answering over 10,000 questions during the last six months while unlocking his phone.

How to Live in NYC with Zero Expenses

Steve Dean

Steve Dean shares his story of after 5 years of struggle and meticulous strategizing, his goal of living in NYC with zero expenses is within reach.

What Causes My Heart Rhythm Disorder

Mark Drangsholt

Mark Drangsholt shares his heart rhythm disorder and discoveries using QS self-tracking methods.

Why I Weighed My Whiskers

Jon Cousins

When Jon was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder, he noticed that his libido seemed to rise and fall as his mood changed. Jon speculated that perhaps his libido fluctuation was an effect of a variance in his testosterone. To test this hypothesis, Jon attempted to measure the growth rate of his beard. In this talk, he shares how he approached the project and his interesting findings.

Narratives Hidden in 20 Years of Personal Financial Data

Peter Torelli

Peter Torelli collected detailed financial information on every dollar he spent for 25 years. He began tracking in college in 1990 due to a fear that he might loose all of his money. In this talk, Peter shares the significant depth he's discovered in his financial data beyond just numbers.

Weight Loss & Muscle Gain w/ Fitbit

Rob Portil

Rob Portil is sixty-six years old and has been overweight twice in his life. He used FitBit for four months to help him reach his target weight. In this video, describes how he experiences the daily tracking, how his sweetheart experiences it differently, which Four Hour Body workouts he does, and some key eating tricks he learned along the way.

Improving My Fitness with Genetics

Ralph Pethica

Ralph discusses how he used genomic and activity tracking data to get better results from his fitness training. Ralph used a 23andMe kit to find out his genetic profile. He researched those genes that have been found to have an impact on fitness to see his body should respond to exercise.

Daily Well being Tracking as a Couple

Jon Cousins

Jon Cousins gives his talk “Daily Well being Tracking as a Couple” at the Silicon Valley Quantified Self Meetup #12. He and his partner, Alex, track their well-being together. Their theory is that emotionally close couples all experience ups and downs together, and that being in tune with somebody else should mean that your ups and downs are kind of in sync, a kind of fellow feeling, maybe what Neuroscientists call feeling somebodies pain with neurons. Their combined wellbeing data suggested that since they started tracking they’ve become much closer.

Technology for Mindfulness

Nancy Dougherty

Can you use technology to be more mindful? Nancy acknowledges at the start of her talk that QS is often thought to be mainly about technology. In her talk, Nancy explains how she stumbled upon the idea of integrating mindfulness into her QS practice. When she took the time to look back at the tracking practice that was her most consistent – weight tracking – she noticed that her weight was just a proxy for her emotional state and corresponding life events. Inspired by a fascinating QS talk by George Lawton about observing his smiles, Nancy built her own smile detection and real-time feedback system.

The Quantified Double Self: A Tale of Twins

Rosane Oliveira

Rosane Oliveiria is a researcher and scholar that focuses on integrative medicine, genomics, and nutrition. She’s also an identical twin. In 2012 she was struck by the different patterns of weight fluctuations that she and her sister, Renata, had been experiencing. Using historical data and medical records she was able to go back in time and track their paired histories, dietary changes, and blood markers. Rosane and Renata started adding to there data-rich story by exploring genetic testing, additional biomarkers, and are looking to incorporate activity and microbiome data in the future.

Sleep Patterns

Laurie Frick

Laurie Frick is a visual artist that make work, objects, and installations that relate to brain rhythm. In the video, she presents her amazing work on daily activity charts and sleep charts translated to art. She measured her nightly sleep for over 3 years using a ZEO eeg headband and has almost 1000 nights of sleep data.

Tracking my baby's sleep

Yasmin Lucero

Yasmin Lucero, a mother, statistician, and wonderful speaker, presented her experience during this Lunchtime Ignite Talk session. She gave a show & tell talk about what she learned from tracking her daughter's sleep. She talks about how tracking her newborn's various behaviors led her to understand parenting.

How to Win a Food Fight

Tone Fonseca

Tone Fonseca talks about the ups and downs of his attempt to to lose a hundred pounds with the help of tools tracking the food he consumed. He concluded that the only way to win a food fight or any fight is you have to change the rules, and that’s what self-tracking gives you, the ability to change the rules just enough so that winning is possible.

An open and integrated platform

Daniel Nofal

Daniel Nofal is the president of The Wikilife Foundation. After his father, a healthy 64 years old man, contracted a rare blood cancer that ended his life, it opened his eyes to the current state of health knowledge. He thought the health information that researchers have is fragmented and it lacks scale, and the health information the public has bias and is unreliable, thus the need for a Wikipedia of crowdsourced health information. He believes that the Quantified Self is gathering information that may be the key to understanding health, but in order for this to happen we need to be able to share the information more broadly and WikiLife could be the answer.

Tracking with Zenobase

Eric Jain

Eric Jain started Zenobase because he was getting fed up entering data into a dozen different, specialized tracking apps that never quite have the data fields he need, and using spreadsheets doesn't seem like much fun for him, either. Zenobase connects apps for time-tracking and self-tracking such as Foursquare, Moves, and FitBit and more.

This Is What I Ate

Ellis Bartholomeus

Ellis Bartholomeus is an applied game designer so she's very curious about motivation and behaviour in that sense. Ellis had a very irregular eating habit. So for her first ever New Year's resolution, she wanted to keep track of what she eats. She started sharing photos of her food and drinks daily on Facebook as an experiment for three months. She did quite well in her first month. She also changed her eating habits because of the feedback she was receiving from her Facebook posts.

Fitting Mental Models

Joost Plattel

Joost studies Chemistry and loves working on experiments. In this video, he talk about some things that he discovered from doing all the tracking that he has done from his experiments. It’s about fitting mental models to a self-tracking life. During the last three years of tracking his food, activity and productivity, he noticed some things happening to his mind. It adapts. He shares his experience of his brain adaptation while tracking since tracking.

My Journey with Sleep Monitoring

Christel de Maeyer

Like many people, Christel de Maeyer felt that her sleep could be better. Presenting at our 2013 conference in Europe, Christel shares what she learned from collecting over three years of sleep data. Before self-tracking, Christel felt that she woke up frequently during the night, and the Zeo confirmed this.

Visualization of data in a learning and self-reflection context

Jose Luis Santos

Jose Luis Santos present his experiment from the Catholic University. The intention of the experiment was to see how second year bachelor students self-manage their time, and self-manage also their group time because they are working in groups. Also they have to face some problems that they have, because they are using new technologies for them. The idea is that we visualize the behavior of the groups. At the end they have to be aware of their own activity and also ought to reflect on the visualization.

Diabetes, Databetes & Marathon Training

Doug Kanter

Doug Kanter has been a Type 1 diabetic for 26 years. Through this time he’s come to learn more about his disease by using many data-gathering tools and his own work in visual analysis at the NYU ITP program. In this talk at the NY QS Meetup Doug talk about his new project to understand how marathon training and running effect his blood sugar and insulin treatment.

Exploring and Visualizing Diabetes Data

Jana Beck

Jana Beck gives a great talk about how she visualizes and communicates data associated with her Type 1 Diabetes. A few years ago at the New York Quantified Self, Jana talks about some self-tracking that she did with her diabetes data, and this talk is a follow up.

Moodscope, subjective ratings and body blogging

Ute Kreplin

Moodscope, subjective ratings and body blogging by Ute Kreplin. A keynote talk at the Quantified Self Conference Europe.

A mobile biofeedback self-experiment: stress and eating

Georgios Papastefanou

Georgios Papastefanou did a one week observation of how stress influences his eating behavior. He did a personal program for losing weight (eating less and mainly vegs and fruits). Using a sensor wristband, push button keypad and a smart phone camera, he kept track of what he ate and drank. The experiment bothered him at first, but he learned that enjoyed measuring himself. This experience pointed him to social psychology of objective self-awareness.

Panic

Evan Savage

Evan Savage has panic attacks, especially triggered by caffeine while driving. In late 2011, he was having multiple panic attacks a week. He didn’t want to take drugs, so he made his own recovery plan – logging his food, exercise, and panic attacks. He eliminated caffeine, and thought he had recovered, then relapsed. In the video below, Evan tells the courageous and entertaining story of how he has navigated through recovery and relapse multiple times, and what he has learned about how to thrive.

Indexer

Indhira Rojas

Indhira Rojas is a student from the California College of the Arts. Indexer is an idea for better ways of tracking our consumption. Indhira Rojas told us about her thesis project Indexer, a database for tracking consumption and managing waste. She wants to help people answer 2 questions: How much do I throw away? And, how do I recycle properly?

SenseOS

Joris Janssen

Joris Janssen is a researcher who’s focused his work on combining sensing algorithms with psychological insights. Currently he’s a researcher and developer at Sense Observation Systems, a Netherlands-based company developing context-aware computing. In this talk, filmed at the Amsterdam QS meetup group, Joris gives a brief explanation of the work they do at SenseOS, then discusses Goalie, an app developed to use psychological theory, active and passive sensing, and a therapy gateway to treat and improve depression.

MyLifeBits

Gordon Bell

Gordon Bell, legendary lifelogger at Microsoft and author of Total Recall, gave a candid, engaging talk on his MyLifeBits project. He showed pictures from his SenseCam that takes a picture every 20 seconds while he's wearing it. He generates 1 GB of data per month, including a screenshot of every website he visits and the hundreds of pages of health records from his multiple bypass surgeries. Gordon considers his data to be a surrogate memory - he doesn't look at it unless he needs to remember something specific, and he enjoys making films from the pictures.

Quantified Self for Preventative Care

Daniel Rinehart

While some people are using their data to help solve or, at least, alleviate seemingly intractable health issues, others are using their data to stave off issues before they occur. Daniel Rinehart talks about using sleep, happiness and biomarker data to keep himself in various “optimized zones” for his long-term health.

Unobtrusive Smart Environments for Monitoring in Everyday Life

Homer Papadopoulos

Papadopoulos Homer, representing the Usefil project explains the QS ecoystem. The QS ecosystems contains monitoring devices, health, and fitness apps and of course rely on very fast networks.

Evolving Health

Joshua Manley

Joshua Manley discusses his work as a data health coach. He shares his personal experiments and discoveries and recognizes that he follows a simple method of science to make these discoveries. He teamed up with Mymee to apply the basic methods to the general population to help people run their own self experiments outside of the QS community. The major breakthrough in the Mymee platform is not that the data is important but perhaps more important than the data is the self-awareness that tracking facilitates.

The Pomodoro Recovery

Mette Dyhrberg

In this talk, Mette Dyhrberg present “The Pomodoro Recovery”. Following the bouncing castle accident, Mette has been diagnosed with concussion and was recommended to rest and avoid using electronic devices in order to recover. She started tracking her symptoms, diet, and resting and working habits using Pomodoro method and Mymee app. The lack of progress has prompted her to look at her tracking data, after which she realized that she may have been misdiagnosed.

Tales of Weight Tracking

Lisa Betts-LaCroix

Lisa Betts-LaCroix has been tracking her weight off and on since 2000. In this talk, Lisa details the trials and tribulations that go along with attempting to track her weight and other associated behavioral variables. From simple excel spreadsheets to using Google forms to finally using the Withings wireless scale Lisa explains why and how she’s finally been successful at reducing her weight.

Meditation and Brain Function

Peter Lewis

As a long-time meditator, Peter Lewis had a suspicion that meditation could improve brain function, so he conducted a self-experiment and enlisted a few other individuals to help test his hypothesis. By using an arithmetic testing application, a timed meditation app, and an ABA research design he found out that there was some support for meditation improving his brain function. However, other participant’s results weren’t as supportive. Watch Peter’s talk, presented at the 2013 Quantified Self Europe Conference, to learn more about his process and hear what he learned by conducting this experiment.

How I Hacked My Meditation Practice with My Mobile Phone

Carlos Rizo

Carlos Rizo tried to use different ways to hack his mindfulness practice using the law of doing less. He was trying to understand and change his behavior and use his password of his phone to get messages to his brain to create new habits.

Visualizing Physiological Data

Rain Ashford

Rain Ashford is a PhD student in the Art and Computational Technology Program at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is based on the concept of “Emotive Wearables” that help communicate data about ourselves in social settings. This research and design exploration has led her to create unique pieces of wearable technology that both measure and reflect physiological signals. In this show&tell talk, filmed at the 2013 Quantified Self Europe Conference, Rain discusses what got her interested in this area and one of her current projects – the Baroesque Barometric Skirt.

Life Logging: Using Spreadsheets

Phil von Stade

Phil von Stade has been life logging for most of his life using spreadsheet. In this talk, he shares how a calendar as a search tool as a way to leverage your accomplishments and as an index to 150,000+ photos! A simple spreadsheet can be your friend.

What's New in QS

Richard Sprague

Richard Sprague covers a variety of new self-tracking devices, including Basis and Shine. The cool thing about Basis, it has an optical heart rate sensor unlike Fitbit. Shine is similar to a Fitbit only is designed to be really small and has an attractive industrial design.

QS + Paleo = ?

Seth Roberts

Seth Roberts offers an interesting perspective on how he has been able to accelerate his own self-discovery. He suggests combining the QS rigor of self-experimentation with the Paleo ideas on diet, exercise, and lifestyle. Seth believes both QS and Paleo communities can benefit by learning from each other. In the video below, he also compares his experiences at the Ancestral Health Conference and the Quantified Self conference.

Quantified Self and the London Olympics

Sky Christopherson

In early 2012, Sky talked about using self-tracking to figure out how to get more sleep. He went on to break a track cycling world record. His experience, and the friends he made in the QS community led him to work with the 2012 US Women's Track Cycling Team while they trained for the London Olympics. In this talk, Sky shares his journey training an underdog cycling team to win a medal in the Olympics.

Inside Tracker

Daniel Gartenberg

Daniel Gartenberg is a Ph.D. student at George Mason. Daniel Gartenberg discuss his recent experience using InsideTracker, a personalized blood biomarker analysis tool from the perspective of the company, the doctor, and the QSer.

Tracking Activity, Posture and Time for Increased Health and Productivity

Florian Schumacher

Florian uses self-tracking to stay fit and focused while working on lots of different projects. In this talk, he shows data from the activity monitor, posture sensor and time-tracking system that helps him maintain his health and productivity.

Activity Tracking and Weight Loss: Apps and Gadgets in Practice

Arne Tensfeldt

Arne Tensfeldt of Hamburg, Germany is an organizer of the QS meet up group there. Arne talks about activity tracking using Withings, Beeminder, and Fitbit to support his weight loss and led to new habits.

Financial Tracking

Rose Delgado

Rosa Delgado started tracking herself since 2009 - she tracks her financials, food, and goals. In this talk, Rosa talks about her success in taking control of her financial health by tracking it.

A Reversed Calendar

Danielle Roberts

Danielle Roberts describes her Reversed Calendar, which goes back in time to 2005 and contains eight years of mood and stress data, along with photos, micro diary entries, and poetry.

Self-Quantification with BodyMedia

Jonny Farringdon

Jonny Farringdon, Director of Informatics at BodyMedia, talks about BodyMedia devices and his experience quantifying his own self. In this talk, Jonny goes over many of the things that distinguish Bodymedia from other trackers as well as shows new products that are coming soon.

2004-2040

Alberto Frigo

A little over 10 years ago Alberto Frigo embarked on an ambitious project, 2004-2040, to understand himself. Starting with tracking everything his right (dominant) hand has used, he’s slowly added on different tracking and documentation projects. Keeping the focus on himself and his surrounding has helped him connect to himself and the world around him.

Activity Tracking for Teams

Joost Plattel

Joost Plattel introduces Qount.us, which runs experiments around tracking physical activities of people within teams. From using Moves to a full dashboard displayed on a wall, he discusses what works.

Self Tracking Awareness and Change

Charles Wang

Charles Wang is a cofounder of Lumo. In this talk, he speaks about how self-tracking leads to self-awareness, which ultimately leads to profound change in people’s lives.

This Is Your Brain On Bike

Arlene Ducao

"This is your brain on bike," said Arlene Ducao, a computer programmer and digital animator at the MIT Media Lab's Information Ecology group showing off a map of city streets studded with colorful dots. Ducao is the inventors of MindRider, the bike helmet that reads its riders' brainwaves (hacked with an EEG sensor that displays the wearer's stress levels). The helmet also correlates the bikers' mental state with their geographical routes, creating maps of what Ducao calls the city's "psychogeography."

The Coffee Experiment

Robin Barooah

Robin Barooah weaned himself off coffee and found that his concentration actually improved. He explains how he did it and what he discovered, which covers news about self-testing and self-monitoring.

Quantifying Motivation with a Smart Shirt

Kirill Gertman

Kirill Gertman works for a company called OM signal that makes bio-sensing shirts. Kirill talks about how the OM signal smart shirt helped him track his weight training, stick to his workout routine, and get measurable results.

Tracking and improving my lung function

Christian Kleinedam

After his visit to the doctor, Christian Kleinedam discovered that his lung function was around 30% to what it should be. In this keynote, he shares his journey how he tracks his lung function and how to improve it.

3D Body Measurement on a Smartphone

Eleanor Watson

Nell Watson runs a company called Poikos. Poikos enables one to measure his/her body in 3-D on a smart phone, tablet, or a PC in seconds with no extra hardware. They are taking this data and applying it to new technologies.

A Year Well Sliced-Lessons From My Laptop

Stan James

Inspired by a friend, Stan James wrote a little script to take a picture on his webcam. He set it to run every half hour. After a few months of starting the project, he presented and share how he felt. In this video, he talks about the progress of the project after running it for an entire year. He also shared what he learned from a year of taking pictures of himself.

Measuring the Moment

Ajay Chander

How are health and habits impacted by momentary assessments? Ajay Chander shares his early experiences with real-time vitals and stress-tracking using the Sprout. The Sprout is a real time mobile data aggregation and analysis platform. It collects data from many on-body and off-body sensors and makes it available to applications that are running and process it in real time and it’s now available on android.

Making Sense of My Bio-signals

Fu-Chieh Hsu

Fu-Chieh Hsu, a self-explorer and a geek, was interested in understanding how his body, brain, and mind works. So after some self-study, he was absolutely convinced that they are absolutely crucial; he ended up building his own own biosensor systems and is now sharing it with everyone. In this talk, he shares his personal journey to study how bio-signals relate to physical and mental states, and how long-term tracking facilitates personal development.

Tracking infants

Ben Blench

In this talk, Ben Blench shares his experience tracking his infant, including a discussion of the different tools he has used. He shares what was used to measure his infant and the shortcomings and advantages and how they can improve. He makes an interesting comparison between digital and analog, noticing that digital tools often have too many features and lack flexibility.

New Horizons

Bruno van den Elshout

Bruno van den Elshout is an independent artist. In 2012, he photographed the North Sea horizon at every hour with 8,785 views into the exact same infinity. In this talk, he discusses about the abundance of tranquility and space in the project ‘New Horizons’ in which he portrays the sea and the sky above at a fixed location over a period of one year: ‘to see what you have never seen’.

Tracking INR

Robert Rothfarb

Rob Rothfarb is a software and interactive multimedia developer in San Francisco, California. In this video, he talks about the medical tracking that he does which includes his blood, diet, weight, sleep activity. He has been tracking his personal health data as a proactive patient for many years.

Walking the Talk: How to do QS

Richard Ryan

Richard Ryan is a co-organizer and a longtime member of Quantified Self. In this talk, he shares an interesting journey with Quantified Self with self-tracking and self-experimentation over the last couple of years. He shares his experiment with the Fisher Wallace Stimulator, an electronic neuro-stimulation device that has been clinically demonstrated to produce therapeutic effects for a variety of conditions such as insomnia and chronic pain. He talks about the various tools that were used in Quantified Self.

Lessons from a year of heart rate data

Kiel Gilleade

Kiel Gilleade researches physiological computing. He streams his heart rate data to Twitter, live, 24 hours a day. Over the course of a year, he learned how his heart rate responded to different events, dietary intake, and changes in routine. In the talk, Kiel shows his entire year of data.

Experience Sampling of My Stress

Ulrich Atz

Ulrich Atz was curious about measuring his stress levels. He chose three methods to do this: experience sampling, day reconstruction method, and heart rate. In this video, he describes how he went about designing his experiment, how the different methods work and the challenges of each one, and what he learned. He was surprised to discover which method worked best.

Tracking my Parkinson's

Kevin Krejci

Kevin Krejci was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease last year. He share his story of how he's using self-tracking applications and devices to help him monitor different symptoms and outcomes related to his diagnosis. Watch his talk to hear about his triumphs and challenges.

Floss the Teeth You Want To Keep

Nick Crocker

Nick Crocker‘s QS journey started with his dentist telling him, “Floss the teeth you want to keep”. Nick tells the story of how he spent five years figuring out how to implement changes in his life, and how hard it was to add this habit to his routine. He also shares ten lessons he learned to make these changes easier.

Parkinson's Tracking Update

Kevin Krejci

Kevin Krejci presents a short update about the ongoing self-tracking and treatment projects he’s undergoing as part of living with Parkinson’s Disease. Back in January, Kevin first presented his tracking journey and how he’s using different tools to understand and improve his life. Watch this talk to see how he’s progressing.

Crossfit

Kai Chang

Kai Chang was a fit competitive rower 15 years ago. He was in great shape! After gaining 50 pounds in recent years he decided to make a change. In this video, Kai talks about his CrossFit training. Kai started CrossFit because it produced effective results with short, high-intensity workouts, which fit well into his busy lifestyle. He used his self-tracking data from CrossFit to motivate (and punish) himself, even when the numbers were bad.

Burning Body Media

Greg Schwartz

Greg Schwartz discusses burning calories in SF vs. at the Burning Man using BodyMedia. He talks about his calories burned in a quiet day, his normal weekend (day), and an intense day at Burning Man. He shares what he did and what he has learned from his tracking.

Fitbit: You Had Me at Smooches

Colette Ellis

Colette Ellis is a Wellness Coach & Consultant, Author, and speaker. In this talk, Collettte discusses her journey using Fitbit, podcasts, and social media to uncover new revelations about her own mind-body health, and identify new ways to support her clients in their overall health and well-being. She tries to understand if Fitbit engages her and if it helps changes her behavior.

Neurologica

Arend Visser

Arend Visser talks about his colleague who studied neurosurgery. He shares what his colleagues have learned and how he could make his knowledge useful for the society and how he discovered a way to stimulate the brain into creating new neuropathways. In this talk, he shares how it works, the procedure, and the progress.

Sensing Breath and Air

Erica Forzani

Erica Forzani shares her experience at the Center of Bioelectronics and Biosensors at Arizona State University. She talks about the development of their new gadgets and the challenges they faced.

Understanding My Blood Glucose

Bob Troia

Bob Troia was interested in his blood glucose. After learning he had an elevated risk for contracting Type 2 Diabetes, he wanted to see if he could lower his fasting glucose levels. He started a long-term tracking experiment where he tested his blood glucose and began to explore the effects of supplementation and lifestyle factors. In this talk, Bob talks about his experiment and what he learned from analyzing his data.

Daily Rhythm Tracking w/ Nike+ Fuelband

Eric Boyd

Eric Boyd started using a Nike FuelBand to track his activity in 2013. Not satisfied with the built in reporting the mobile and web applications were delivering he decided to dive into the data by accessing the Nike developer API. By being able to access the minute-level daily data, Eric was able to make sense of his daily patterns, explore abnormalities in his data, and learn a bit more about how the FuelBand calculated it’s core metrics. In this talk, he shares his experiences.

Six Year Visual Lifelogging

Cathal Gurrin

In this talk, ultra-photologger, Cathal Gurrin moderates a QS Conversation about lifelogging. Using various wearable sensing devices to automatically record everything you see, hear, learn, and experience; creates a complete and accurate visual record of your life activities is a lifelog. Cathal talks about the the various interphases to digital memories that were used during the six years of vusual lifelogging.

The Future of Wearable Sensors - From Quantifying Behavior to Quantifying Health

Marco Altini

Marco Altini works for Imec. His company develops wearable technology (i.e wearable sensors, wireless wearable sensors for EEG, stress, and physical activity monitoring). They often combined accelerometer data and physiological data to create these sensors. In this video, he talks about quantifying health using these wearable sensors.

Rhythmanalysis

Kiel Gilleade

Kiel Gilleade has been interested in measuring and visualizing physiological data for quite a while. In this video, Kiel talks about his new project, Rhythmanalysis. Rhythmanalysis was a project centered on “visualizing the biological rhythms of employees at different workplaces.” He describes his experience working on this project and some of the lessons he learned along the way.

Quantifying the Emotional Self

Su Hyun Kim

Su Hyun Kim is a second year graduate student at NYITP. She has always been interested in other people's emotions and feelings. In this video, she shares her ongoing project on emotional data including her experiences with the various tools she used.

Quantified Awesome

Sacha Chua

Sacha Chua discusses why it's worth it to build your own personal dashboard. She shares how simple it is and how it lets you track so many more things that companies might never get around to doing. In this video, she talks about her personal dashboard, www.quantifiedawesome.com and all the things she has been tracking; clothes, time, etc.. She built it using Ruby on Rails.

Data from my iPhone ECG

David Albert

David Albert discusses how to understand Quantified Self and how the community can embrace it. He describes three efforts that aimed at marshaling and using Quantified Self. He shares his data from his iPhone ECG that he has pioneered through AliveCor.

Tracking My Hearing Loss

Lindsay Meyer

Lindsay Mayer was recently diagnosed with Idiopathic Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss. The condition affects affects approximately 5 to 20 people in every 100,000; this means I’m 1 in 20,000. In this video, she shares how it started, what she went through, and how tracking her data helped her through this difficult and challenging time. She also discusses what she has learned from tracking her hearing loss.

Tracking your brain on booze, Boozerlyzer

Caspar Addyman

Caspar Addyman is an experimental psychologist who is interested in what drugs and alcohol do to your brain. In this video, Caspar talks about the Boozerlyzer, which tracks what happens to your brain when you’re drinking. The Boozerlyzer is available in the Adroid store and Caspar explains how to use it.

Achieving the Good Life via Positive Psychology-Based QS

Jeff Fajans

Jeff Fajans discusses his yearlong tracking project, achieving the "good life" via positive psychology based QS. In his project, he specifically looks at character strengths and how they relate to one's vitality and vital engagement via two indicators of hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing with the purpose of really learning what makes him thrive and how can he enhance his life. As a result of his project, he believes that by using positive psychology as a framework, we can learn to focus on our strengths and enhance the vitality and vital engagement of our lives and ultimately lead us to the "good life".

Using Lift

Ellen de Lange-Ros

Ellen de Lang-Ros helps small entrepreneurs build their business who like to use technology to improve their lives, or to have fun. In this video, she talks about how she used Lift to build her business and her spiritual life. Lift is easy-to-use, simple, with a customized dashboard app about uplifting yourself.

VO2Max

Dave Miller

Dave Miller is a competitive cyclist and a graduate student in persuasive technology exploring how can technology influence behavior. He was interested in getting a VO2 Max test to access his potential. In this video, he talks about what VO2 Max is and why test it, and how much is determined by genetics.

15 Weeks of Self Tracking - 40 Pounds Lost

Justin Foo

Justin Foo, studied data analysis in school and at first wasn't interested in Quantified Self until he got started with Fitbit. In this video, Justin discusses how he lost 40 pound by self-tracking with Fitbit. For 15 weeks, he used Fitbit to track his activity, his diet, and a little bit of his sleep. He shares what he did do, how he did it, and what he learned from it.

Tracking Parkinsons & Medication

Sara Riggare

Sara Riggare is an engineer, graduate student, and mother. She also has Parkinson’s Disease. In this talk, she shares her insights and experience with tracking how her medication impacted her movement throughout the day and how that enabled her to have more meaningful conversations with her healthcare team.

Quantifying Seat Time

Mark Leavitt

Mark Leavitt is a physician and engineer. He has been on a quest for five years to use self-tracking to take control and master his personal health. In this video, he discusses how he did it, what tools he used and what it did for his health.

Nasal Breathing Improves Wellbeing

Scott Wolf

Scott Wolf is a physician and a medical device inventor who is fascinated with noses. He thinks nasal breathing is important and essential for health, but also for mood energy and well-being. He shares his experiences with Breath Right Strip and how his mood and his well-being improves when he wears it.

Genes and other strangers

Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is on the board of 23andme and she is also subject number three of the personal genome project. Her entire genome is up online. In this talk, she discusses how genome can help you perhaps predict when you will be dead. She tries to point out in that your genetics matter a lot, for example 70%-80% of your risk for getting Type 1 Diabetes is genetically pre-determined.

The Nutritional Researchers Cohort

Andre Boorsma

Andre Boorma works for T&L, a research organization in the Netherlands and last year they started working on a project where the researchers are the subject. She introduces and describes the Nutritional Researchers Cohort, a ground breaking study using self-tracking to examine diet and nutrition. The group consists of 70 nutrition researchers who have created a voluntary cohort of self-trackers sharing data for science. In this video, they talk about the lessons and explore whether this approach of voluntary and participatory public health research could grow and inspire similar projects.

Getting Things Done, Quantified

Tiago Forte

Tiago teaches an online class which is an introduction to productivity philosophy and a method created by David Allen. Tiago needed a way for him and his students to track changes in productivity over time. He was looking for a system that had to be simple, mobile, and does not require too much time for behavior change because it’s for beginners and needs to provide real insights. In this video he shares his learnings.

Quantified Spending: a Blueprint to Make Data-Driven Financial Decisions

Amaan Penang

Two years after graduation, Amaan saw how much money he saved up. He realized he needed to keep better track of his money especially after moving to the SF Bay Area. In this video, he talks about how he did it. He also shares the tools he used and what he learned.

Psychological Self-Monitoring for the Military

David Cooper

David Cooper tried to combined psychology and technology in his current job. He works for the military, specifically under the army and work on building applications – psychology related applications for active service members and their families for two reasons. In this video, he talks about the application that they have developed and some that they were working on. The application that they created is called Mood Tracker. It allows people to create their own rating scale, using a visual analog scale which is a quick slider back and forth.

Self-Experiments With Sleep, Cognition, and Fasting

Ariel Berwaldt

Ari Berwaldt has been suffering from consistent fatigue and mental fog, and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Then a few months ago he found the Quantified Mind website. In this video, Ari talks about using Zeo and Quantified Mind to measure effects of sleep on cognition, and shows fascinating data about lack of expected correlation. He also talks briefly about fasting and blood glucose experiment that shows poor accuracy of blood glucose monitors.