Are You Part Of The Quantified Self “Movement”?

I’m not sure whether to call it a movement or a trend or some other term, but I think it’s very interesting.  This idea of capturing and tracking data manually and through devices fits very well with the idea of “Know Your Numbers” in healthcare.

Here’s the descriptionof Quantified Self from Wikipedia:

The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).

The movement was started by Wired Magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly in 2007as “a collaboration of users and tool makers who share[d] an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking”. In 2010, Wolf spoke about the movement at TED, and in May 2011 the first international conference was held in Mountain View, California.

Quantified Self is also known as self-tracking, body data and life-hacking. It is described in articles such as this one in the Economist and this in Forbes.

With an increasing amount of devices on the market that can be integrated (e.g, FitBit), we will see a huge rise in remote patient monitoring where the patient takes a greater role in this effort.  Even know you are seeing more efforts to integrate devices into the “smart home” with a focus on older patients, but I think this smart home concept will continue to grow. 

This Slideshare presentation is a nice summary…