New to Quantified Self? We help you make discoveries using your own data. Find some good tips for newcomers on our “Get Started” page.
Useful tips for newcomers.
Get inspiration and ideas from hundreds of self-tracking projects documented in our community archive, searchable by tools and topics.
Our archive of hundreds of self-tracking projects.
Essays, links, and short posts from Quantified Self participants on the culture, tools, and methods of self-tracking.
Posts on self-tracking culture, tools, and methods.
Find your local QS Meetup, learn how to start your own QS group, and register for our annual conference.
Join national, international, and local QS events.
Ask questions and help others by sharing advice and knowledge about self-tracking tools and methods.
Ask questions and share knowledge with the QS community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jordan Clark used his heart rate variability (HRV) data to measure psychological effects of microaggressions as part of his research quantifying the Black experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moodscope, subjective ratings and body blogging by Ute Kreplin. A keynote talk at the Quantified Self Conference Europe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
