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