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Essays, links, and short posts from Quantified Self participants on the culture, tools, and methods of self-tracking.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Presentation at Seattle Quantified Self, 2019-01-10
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
