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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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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.
Juliana Chua works for Zensorium, which is located in Singapore. Zensorium came up with a product called Bing which helps one measure oneself passively on a day-to-day basis. The product not only measures mood, but it also tracks sleep and activity. In this talk, she shares how she used quantification to temper the travails of her own life, as well as help both national athletes and regular working people.
Steven Jonas discovered through an EEG assessment that he had a strong “freeze” response to stressful situations. This inspired him to use his emWave to monitor his stress levels, hack it to alert him whenever he got too stressed, and change his patterns at work. Steven shares his experience and learnings in this insightful project.
Lydia Lutsyshyna tracked the timing and location of her activities, then experimented with clearly separating studying and non-studying intervals to see if this simple delineation produced noticeable effects in her behavior.
For the last decade Todd Greco has been using a variety of data sources to build up his exobrain, including recording every location he's visited, allowing him to call up each place individually or map them.
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.
Ellis Bartholemeus is a big fan of quantifying and at QS17 she discusses her "quantified body" as she tracked her physical scars. She also shares the data on her scars which includes the date of the injury, size of the scar, impact of the scar, and healing time. In this talk, Ellis exposes the intimate and deep learning that come from simply slowing down to examine a part of one's life--in this instance, her scars.
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.
JD Leadam presents his personal story of self-tracking that had transformative effects on his life by ultimately rewiring his brain. He shares his self-tracking obsession from analysis paralysis to eventual discovery of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)--an unprecedented tool which provided him with the ability to rewire his brain to lead a less-stressed life.
Justin Timmer has been tracking about 40 variables using apps and wearables since 2013. In this talk, he shares his findings from his data; how tracking himself raises his awareness of things, confronts him with facts and makes him investigate deeper. He also shares what learned about happiness, stress, his phone use, sleep, and many other life-lessons.
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.
Paul LaFontaine is the orgainzer of the Denver Quantified Self meetup and he does a lot of experiments on himself, including but not limited to, running electricity through his brain and taking additional supplements to see how his body will react. Because he does a lot of experiments, he decided to run a test on himself. He measured his energy four times a day, during two major changes in food and exercise and then he mapped that against his whole day to see how it affected his energy. He shares his unexpected results with some lessons about his "fight or flight" response.
Aaron Parecki has been tracking various aspects of this life for years – specifically location, weight, and sleep. These are the three things Aaron has managed to track consistently. Combining these data sources helped him learn new things about himself. In this video, he talks about his tracking practices and his thoughts on why a personal data server is an important tool.
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.
Steve Zadig is the co-founder and COO of Vita Connect. He is 63 years old, about 10 pounds overweight and is a moderate QS'er. In this video, he discusses what he learns from his vitals from racing cars. He believes racing cars requires a lot of focus. Steve shares data from a race and and discuss how he uses it and what it means in his life.
Juliana Chua of Zensorium is a woman in her early 30s who enjoys working, but is not fond of exercising. There are three things she wanted to know: 1) how does she relax her mind and body 2) What are her highlights, and 3) What is her stress level. In this video, she talks about how she used Tinké and what she learned from using it.
Juliana discusses her steps, sleep, stress and also her fitness level. She shares how she did it and what she she has learned. She uses data from her activity, sleep, heart rate, and stress sensors to explore the effects of mindfulness on her physical condition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A couple years ago, Josh Berson broke his foot and at first he thought it would bring him distress. Instead, it gave him a chance to explore the arrhythmic quality of our movements, and how the arrhythmic quality of movement over a number of timescales, from a tenth of a second to days, seasons, and years. In this talk, he shares how he got from self-observation to the view in order to really understand our rhythms of activity at rest and motor readiness or motor vigilance.
Paul LaFontaine is on an incredible journey to understand himself, his stress, and how he works through consistent examination of his heart rate variability (HRV). In this talk, Paul describes how he experimented with cognitive testing and recording his HRV to better understand if he was in a Flow state, and how to attain that balance between challenge and skill. He provides some very interesting personal conclusions about the role of belief in one’s own abilities versus actual skills.
Bill Schuller is the organizer of the QS Dallas Meetup. He has given a lot of talks about tracking; however, he isn't satisfied with his talks. So like any good self-tracker, he set out to see what he could learn from tracking and measuring his talk. In this talk, Bill presents some of the tools he uses in real-time to measure himself and the audience.
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.
In early 2012, Sky talked about using self-tracking to figure out how to get more sleep. He went on to break a track cycling world record. His experience, and the friends he made in the QS community led him to work with the 2012 US Women's Track Cycling Team while they trained for the London Olympics. In this talk, Sky shares his journey training an underdog cycling team to win a medal in the Olympics.
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.
"This is your brain on bike," said Arlene Ducao, a computer programmer and digital animator at the MIT Media Lab's Information Ecology group showing off a map of city streets studded with colorful dots. Ducao is the inventors of MindRider, the bike helmet that reads its riders' brainwaves (hacked with an EEG sensor that displays the wearer's stress levels). The helmet also correlates the bikers' mental state with their geographical routes, creating maps of what Ducao calls the city's "psychogeography."
After his visit to the doctor, Christian Kleinedam discovered that his lung function was around 30% to what it should be. In this keynote, he shares his journey how he tracks his lung function and how to improve it.
How are health and habits impacted by momentary assessments? Ajay Chander shares his early experiences with real-time vitals and stress-tracking using the Sprout. The Sprout is a real time mobile data aggregation and analysis platform. It collects data from many on-body and off-body sensors and makes it available to applications that are running and process it in real time and it’s now available on android.
Fu-Chieh Hsu, a self-explorer and a geek, was interested in understanding how his body, brain, and mind works. So after some self-study, he was absolutely convinced that they are absolutely crucial; he ended up building his own own biosensor systems and is now sharing it with everyone. In this talk, he shares his personal journey to study how bio-signals relate to physical and mental states, and how long-term tracking facilitates personal development.
Ulrich Atz was curious about measuring his stress levels. He chose three methods to do this: experience sampling, day reconstruction method, and heart rate. In this video, he describes how he went about designing his experiment, how the different methods work and the challenges of each one, and what he learned. He was surprised to discover which method worked best.
Arend Visser talks about his colleague who studied neurosurgery. He shares what his colleagues have learned and how he could make his knowledge useful for the society and how he discovered a way to stimulate the brain into creating new neuropathways. In this talk, he shares how it works, the procedure, and the progress.
Marco Altini works for Imec. His company develops wearable technology (i.e wearable sensors, wireless wearable sensors for EEG, stress, and physical activity monitoring). They often combined accelerometer data and physiological data to create these sensors. In this video, he talks about quantifying health using these wearable sensors.
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.
