quantified self

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Quantified self refers both to the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with technology and to a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools, many of whom are using their personal websites to own their data.

Why Quantified Self?

Quantified self lets you learn more about yourself. Tracking data lets you see how you have evolved over time in accordance with particular metrics.

Quantified self involves defining a set of metrics that are personally relevant to you. No one's quantified self setups are the same. Some people track health data; others track their exercises.

Privacy

One issue with quantified self projects is privacy. When data is out into the world, you no longer have control over it. This issue can be resolved by keeping metrics personal. The problem with this approach is that it becomes more difficult to create "art" from quantified self, which appears to be a goal that some quantified self enthusiasts have in mind.

Considerations

Static Websites

Quantified self projects are more difficult to work with on static websites. Static websites regenerate all the pages on a site every time they are built. As you accumulate more data for a project, there are more pages that need to be generated.

One option is to create a separate web service to host a static website.

IndieWeb Examples

Aaron Parecki

Lillian Karabaic

Silo Examples

Exist

Main article: Exist

Fitbit

Main article: Fitbit

Fitbit is commonly used in quantified self setups to source exercise data. Fitbit supports tracking activity, food consumption, heart rate, sleep, among other metrics which are core to many quantified self projects. The Fitbit API provides access to a range of the metrics available in the application.

Articles

2018-09-23 Aaron Parecki Ten Years of Tracking My Location

Sessions

IndieWebCamp sessions, presentations_about, and related discussions about quantified self or related topics

2012/Quantified_Self
2014-05-29 15:00-07:00 Aaron Parecki: AWE2014 Presentation "The Future of Quantified Self and Data Ownership"
- launch presentation
2014/quantified-self
2015/Brighton/pesos
2018/Baltimore/identity
2019/Austin/personallogging
2019/Düsseldorf/gps

Smaller mentions and notes