Quantified Self

What is Quantifed Self ?

Some of the aspects of Quantified Self

Self-Quantifying or Self-Tracking or Body Hacking is a quite recent movement based on the idea that the storage and the study of every aspect of a person's daily life are able to bring better self-knowledge and help for improvement.

The kind of data in which self-quantifiers are interested is extremely diverse.

The best-known applications of Quantified Self have included tracking physical activity, calorie intake and sleep quality and quantity.

For instance, if you are interested in improving your training for a marathon, you can track your performance when you run by providing data collected with your smartphone or with a device like a wristband to an application. Then, you can learn very useful things on the application’s dashboard. For instance, it can highlight that you are running much better if you have slept enough the days before your run. Or, it can also indicate your weaknesses to work on (e.g. you can have to work on your sprint performances to be better for long distances)..

The californian Fitbit wristband to track physical activity

Quantified Self also aims at tracking many others aspects of everyday life like the quality of surrounding air, your mood or also your blood oxygen level.

Another application of Quantified Self is among people with a chronic disease. Quantified Self can help them to better understand the factors that are bad for them. For instance, some asthma inhalers contain a GPS tracker. Thank to the geolocalisation, it enables a user to discover his or her vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors. For instance, the user can learn that some trees are very dangerous for her because her inhaler would have highlighted that she often needs to use it when this kind of trees are around.

Besides, still among people with a chronic disease, Quantified Self enables the users to keep track of symptoms, treatments and reactions to treatment for hundreds of conditions. Then, people can better understand what works for them and also share information with people with the same disease. This phenomenon has created huge databases that can provide precious data both for doctors or patients. However, the data collected individually may be less reliable than those of a pharmaceutical field test. But, as Quantified Self aficionados use different devices (like their phones, some smart wristbands, etc.) these databases are much richer.

Why this can help ?

Quantified Self can help people in different ways.

First, it can provide you new data thanks to sensors.

It can also uncover patterns in peoples’ habits.

Some of the patterns can be more or less obvious. For instance, as far as sleep is concerned, the dashboard can teach you that alcohol or caffeine are quite bad for a good night of sleep. But, to begin with, seeing it can be more powerful that just knowing barely it. Besides, the information can be much more precise. For instance, your device can show you that coffee after 4:30 pm is quite bad for your sleep.

Furthermore, it can free people from cognitive biases like in the estimation of calorie intake for instance. Indeed, studies show that the fatter someone is the more he underestimates the calorie intake in a meal. So, these kinds of application can help people to lose weight.

Besides, tracking your progress can be a good source of motivation. 

MyfitnessPal : an application to track food and physical activity with a social aspect

The social aspect of Quantified Self

By making it possible to share data on specialized websites, Quantified Self creates communities of people with the same interests.

At the beginning, the early adopters of Quantified Self were tech obsessed yuppies of the West Coast but, now, 69% of Americans track at least one aspect of their life. So, it is a very significant trend.