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