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2 3 4 5 1 57 www.hplusmagazine.com With a background in molecular genetics and bioinformatics, as well as a history of chronic pain, I started tracking to help myself. But I soon wanted to apply what I had learned to help others. Here are two of the projects I'm currently working on. QUanTIFIeD SelF Imagine a show-and-tell for grownups. Fifty or so people get together every month in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. They show each other the data they've collected, the tools they've built, the ideas they have, or the self-tracking projects they're working on. Feedback and questions pop up from the audience. All of it is reminiscent of the Homebrew Computer Club. This amazing group, which calls itself The Quantified Self, was started in 2007 by Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf of Wired Magazine. They noticed a trend in people seeking greater self- knowledge, and using numbers on this quest to understand themselves. (Hence the name.) SoMe oF The PRoJecTS ThaT haVe Been ShoWn- anD-TolD aT QUanTIFIeD SelF MeeTUPS InclUDe: Tweetwhatyoueat Alex Rossi showed a demo of the web application he built to help people keep track of the foods they eat. He even added a crowdsourced calorie lookup, so if you're not sure how many calories were in the banana you just ate, you can see what eight other people estimate the calories of a banana to be. He used the Twitter API, with a simple prefix people can use in their tweets that will direct the information to his system. (See a video of his Quantified Self presentation in Resources.) lifecasting Ryan Grant showed a wearable camera he was working on that would take tens of thousands of pictures every day. That's a picture every 2 to 5 seconds. It's like a memory assistant that puts scrapbooking to shame. Of course, categorizing and searching all those photos is the next challenge. (See Resources for Ryan's talk.) Fish Oil Makes You Smarter Here is an example of pure self-experimentation. Tim lundeen gave himself a cognitive test of 100 simple math problems, every day for 130 days. On day 80, he started taking double his normal dose of DHA (from fish oil), and his time to complete the math problems decreased. See the chart to right. Your Genome on Twitter At a recent Quantified Self meetup, Attila Csordas talked about his attempt to post the data from his 23andMe genome scan to Twitter, with each SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) expressed as a tweet. What happens when more people make their personal health information public? Does the health information have a life and friends of its own? Would you follow a SNP on Twitter? These are some of questions that arose out of this animated discussion. A Square Meal Mimi Chun, at a New York Quantified Self meetup, showed the beautiful quantitative artwork she created based on the color of her food palette over the course of a week (see right). days less dha (400 mg/day) more dha (800 mg/day) time to do 100 problems (sec) on a typical day, my pain level is 2, my weight is 126 lbs, i did 1 hour of walking, my happiness is 9, and i slept 6 hours.