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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
