Quantifiedself’s Presentations on SlideShare. Know thyself: the Quantified Self devotees who live by numbers | Science. A large man in an orange shirt is hopping up and down on one leg at the front of the hall explaining how the exercises had no effect on his sleep patterns. A researcher from Liverpool tells how he learned about the effects on his body of calorie-laden sandwiches, drinking sessions and Christmas feasting by monitoring his heart rate non-stop for a year. Elsewhere speakers with Parkinson's disease, chronic social anxiety and back problems explain how tracking their personal data helped ease their symptoms.
Welcome to the sometimes wacky and often intriguing world of the Quantified Self, an eclectic band of hackers, geeks, fitness freaks, patients and early adopters that, from its birth in California in 2008, has grown into a global movement of more than 5,000 members in 11 countries. Last weekend 260 delegates gathered in Amsterdam to share their experiences at the first Quantified Self Europe conference. That is changing and fast, if the self-quantifying vanguard is to be believed. What I Learned from QS Europe. There are many ways to experience a conference, especially one with so many inspiring overlapping sessions presented by attendees. My personal bias is towards mood tracking, so that’s mostly what I paid attention to this weekend, as well as meeting all the impressive quantifiers who came!
If you want to look back over the conference, here are links to the photos and tweets that came out of it. Paul Miller, Martha Rotter, and Gangadhar Sulkunte also wrote up some great summaries of their experiences. Huge thanks to our great friends at QS Amsterdam for helping to make this happen! Here is some of what I took away from the weekend: Jenny Tillotson is working on “emotional clothing” that can sense how you’re feeling and boost your mood/energy or help you relax.I had never thought of the idea of collecting silence, as Danielle Roberts does.Lisette Sutherland’s recipe for overcoming social anxiety? What we learned about habits at #qs2011 Amsterdam. We had a great breakout session about "How to build habits" at the QS conference that just finished in Amsterdam. Lots of people were excited about continuing the conversation and sharing resources and ideas so I said I would start a thread here with some notes from the breakout session and hopefully other people will post their own notes, thoughts, questions etc...
I am sorry I didn't get everyone's names or twitter handles so I hope you will post here. Nancy Dougherty @nancyhd already posted a great list of resources, some of which she brought up during the session: One of the big things that emerged was that it helps a lot to design your environment, in order to make certain habits easier. For example: John Amschler's @jxa living room is set up as a gym, no TV and no couch in front of the computer. Yosef Safi Harb @ysharb leaves his laptop charger at the office so that he doesn't spend time on his laptop when he gets home.
Ioan. Laurie Frick | The art of tracking: QS Amsterdam by Laurie Frick on Prezi. Quantified Self Europe | Paul Miller. Quantified Self Europe I spent the weekend in Amsterdam for the first Quantified Self Europe conference which follows on from an event in Silicon Valley earlier this year (written up by the FT here). I learned a lot and thought I’d pop some notes up so you can see what’s been going on. First presentation of the weekend was Rain Ashford talking about wearable computing. She showed how McLaren are using sensors inside the suits of Formula One drivers to try to monitor the drivers as well as they monitor the cars.
McLaren call this “human telemetry” and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see a few spinouts from them over the coming years. She also showed some electronic tattoos that included circuitry and another experiment by the Australian army that is developing flexible solar panels to be used in the field to power equipment. My favourite talks of the weekend were the show and tell sessions. There was a lot of buzz around Nancy Dougherty’s project which took a completely different angle. Home - Sense OS. QS Europe 2011 · brygidawalczak. First day of QS Europe 2011 in Amsterdam | Sara. My first ever day at an unconference and the impressions have been numerous. I love the idea of having the focus of the meeting on the breaks between the presentations, since everybody knows that the really sparking ideas are born over a cup of coffee and some strange looking local speciality (in this case I would call it as the mandarine mousse for the win, or maybe the odd-looking fruit with thorns or spikes…).
Among the ideas/impressions I will take away from today are: The AMAZING workshop on Personal Data Visualization, curated to perfection by the ultimate mix of design, art and data management in the trinity of the hosts.The tweet: @martijnhulst: Nice quote: remember if you’re not paying for the product you are the product. #privacy #qs2011The discussion on how to address data that could be percieved as negative for the person.and of course all the amazing meetings with generous, amazingly passionate and fascinating people! QS Amsterdam Mindfulness Pills Breakout.