Complete Self-Tracking Resource Guide (beta) to be Unveiled at Quantified Self Conference

"We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?" – The New York Times on The Data Driven Life

In so many aspects of our lives, we crave quality information to help us make more informed decisions. In our work, it is essential. In our homes, we can tell you the price of almost everything. Even in our leisure time, we can recite facts and figures on how many homeruns a baseball player has hit or the number of Oscar nominations a film has received.

Yet in perhaps the most important area–our own personal health–Americans seem to have very little information. For example, only 30% of us know our own blood type and less than 20% of older Americans can tell you their blood pressure. If information is king, when it comes to our health most of us are paupers.

Fortunately, a small group of pioneers are developing the tools and technologies that allow us to collect and track a whole host of quantifiable qualities that can provide insight into our health and health-related behaviors—heart rate, mood, footsteps, attention span, body motion, blood pressure and beyond. Their goal is to enable people to collect their own data, aggregate and analyze it so that they are empowered to be active stakeholders in their own care and understand how their decisions impact their health. Visionaries like Gary Wolf, co-founder of The Quantified Self, are making personalized metrics easier to track and more meaningful to apply.

At Pioneer, we are intrigued by self-tracking and the quantified self movement, and are eager to explore its potential to transform health and health care. To that end, we will be participating in the first Quantified Self Conference to explore, collect and share ideas and collaborate with those on the cutting edge of this movement—leading users, self-trackers, software developers, business leaders, academics and health practitioners.

At the conference, Gary will also debut a beta version of a complete self-tracking resource guide. Quantified Self and the Institute for the Future (IFTF), through an RWJF Pioneer grant, will work with self-tracking leaders to develop this online guide, which assembles many of the tools people are creating, in order to share evolving strategies with the next generation of self-trackers. According to Pioneer team member and RWJF Chief Technology and Information Officer Steve Downs, "The first wave of quantified self practitioners is largely made up of those with the technical skills to build their own self-tracking tools. The next wave will not have those same skills, so it will be important to make available the tools that have already been built and see how they are adopted."

If these ideas get your brain synapses firing, too, we encourage you to join us at the Conference.  Come rub elbows with cutting-edge thought leaders and explore with us the potential this movement could have on improving your health and the health of our country.  

 

Comments

[Chris]

The Quantified Self work does seem exciting. Equally exciting though for clinicians are the data analytics tools that are evolving and enabling organizations to aggregate complex healthcare data including acuity, financial, treatment, and outcomes data to uncover best practice care practices.

Then, organizations can standardize on the best practices and remove variation that ultimately improves care and removes cost from the system.