At the Quantified Self meetup

I managed to get to the London Quantified Self meetup tonight. It was also in the Google Campus. I was a longtime they had the last meetup so I was really curious how this goes.


There were 6 speakers, short sessions and questions afterwards. Each session supposed to present a project or an idea. The most interesting was to see that a lot of people there were really enthusiastic about data. And luckily not from the business point of view.

There was a quite interesting session, the founder of Sleepio showed his service to the audience. The service is for helping people who suffer from sleeping problems. It collects some behavioral data and provides suggestions and on-the-fly helps in order to get well with sleeping. It's using proven methodologies to aim the problems.

Another guy had a mobile app measuring mood data by tracking several behavioral items. Like movements, location and activities on the device. If I got the concept right, you also can chose to make your data available to the service for further analysis - which is kinda awesome.

By the question is turned out many guys there know the data-business much better than me. All the special services, metrics and analysis. A lot was interested in health - obviously, but the surprising thing is mood. Mood was the second most popular thing. I'm tracking my mood for almost a year and always thought it's pathetic, because I'm not the happiest person and that's something bad. So it's good to know there are a valid number of interest out there.

What is also really beneficial on such a meetup is the tons of practices. How they measure, what they track, how they get the results. Basically it's all part of a full service. For StatDiary I'm doing some brainstorming lately and sketched up some possible improvements for the future.

Generally people suffer from similar problems that I do. One of the biggest of actually is entering data to the system. What big players are do is they developing the hardware as well, just like wrist bands, or heart rate monitors or special watches. Personally I don't believe that's scalable - however to target special behavioral tracking needs special tool - that I don't doubt.

That's all for tonight. Unfortunately the next meetup will be help in 6 to 8 weeks from now. Looking forward to it.

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Peter