Maggie Delano: The Case for Open Instrumentation

Published in

Quantified Self Public Health

2 min readApr 28, 2018

*Maggie Delano, assistant professor of Engineering at Swarthmore College, makes medical devices for cardiovascular disease, and uses them in her own self-tracking projects.*

How do we commercialize technology in a way that allows the patient to have access to their information every step of the way? — Maggie Delano

Maggie Delano is a professor of engineering and long time contributor to the Quantified Self community. She uses the fluid status monitor she prototyped for heart failure to illustrate that there are certain problems that lack a data set or even a tool. In heart failure, there’s not device that patients can use at home to measure the fluid balance and associated swelling that predicts hospital readmission. This problem stands in for many others in which the bottleneck from lab prototype to accessible instrumentation hinders learning.

Maggie Delano uses her fluid status monitor as an opportunity for self-trackers to advance CVD research by volunteering for validation studies — and learning about themselves in the process.

Highlights from the QS Symposium 2018

Introduction to the Quantified Self Symposium 2018

Reza Mirza: The History and Future of Single-Subject Science

Hugo Campos: 10 Years With An Implantable Cardiac Device, Still No Data Access

Jana Beck: Carb Intake and 60 Lipid Measurements

Azure Grant: Lessons from Blood Testers, a Participant-Led Project

Dorothy D. Sears: Circadian Rhythms and Cardiometabolic Health

Carsten Skarke: Characterizing the Chronobiome with “Supertrackers”

Whitney E. Boesel: Cholesterol Variability Across Postpartum Menstrual Cycles

Xiao Li: Finding the Signal in Rich Self-Collected Data

Katherine Kim: What Counts as Clinical Data? Incorporating Self-Collected Observations into CVD Research

Jeffrey Olgin: Data Aggregation for N-of-1 to “N-of-Many-Ones”