It's paradoxical that this community starts off with "self" but they are an amazing bunch of sharers, as I found out at last night's Meetup for the San Francisco Quantified Self group held at the Autodesk Gallery.
So what are self-quanitifiers? What do they quantify? What is this movement all about? (And yes, it is a movement - there is even a Quantified Self European Conference in May.)
The QS movement is a collaboration of users and makers of self-tracking tools whose goal is to help people get meaning out of their personal data.
At the Meetup we heard presentations via a common format of what am I measuring, how am i measuring it, and what am I learning. The presentations covered many areas: people tracking their blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, sleeping patterns, fitness levels, moods at different locations and different times of the day. We also heard a very moving story from a Parkinson's sufferer tracking the loss of control and inexorable decline resulting from that terrible disease. Topics are not always medical: at a past meeting, we heard about tracking incidents of personal harrassment at different locations and times of the day.
State of the movement: the tools are still crude - they are not entirely accurate. They do not talk to each other. There is no standard protocol. Data is often locked in the device or the app, for example, there is no way to export my Fitbit data to Excel.
At this nascent state, it's interesting to see the value of sharing in this community of selfies. We're all trying to find out about different technologies; about how better to report and track; how better to analyze and record. And how to stop having to manually collate this information.
What do you think that you would you like to measure about your daily activities? How would you use that data to make your life better?
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