I was quoted a while ago in the a BBC piece (below) on the Quantified Self movement.
I had a few additional things I wished I could have said, and thought it'd be good to post them:
I find that in social conversation most of the QS stuff for me is an
outgrowth of sports and fitness. I think the same people who were
talking about their Garmin heart rate monitor a few years ago are now
talking about tracking their sleep/wake cycles and blood pressure now.
The iphone is obviously a key "hub" device here, but perhaps
unappreciated, the GPS-enabled Garmin forerunner was really quite a
pathbreaker a few years ago and I think much QS discussion builds on
this -- i.e. people sharing their running routes and heartrate
measurements. The fact that this conversation is mostly sports
oriented makes it much "lighter" and more recreationally tech oriented
than the medical side of QS. Moreover, the geographical nature of
biking and hiking also plugs into the whole map and geotagged image
world, which can be quite an obsession for people like me (see for
instance, http://blog.gerstein.info/search/label/routes-timings, esp.
http://blog.gerstein.info/2007/10/cycling-and-walking-around-vienna-with.html
).
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130102-self-track-route-to-a-better-life/print
IN DEPTH| 3 January 2013
Quantified self: The tech-based route to a better life?
By Karen Weintraub
