Quantified Self in Dublin
The iWatch, Fitbit, sleep trackers, smartphone apps that can track every thing you do in your life.
But are they useful? Sure tracking 10k steps will improve our health, but how can we actually tell? Will they really motivate us to get off our coaches on a cold winters evening to reach our goals? Will they improve our sleep? Will they even benefit us in the long run or is it just adding to busyness to our lives?
These are just some of the questions people are working through & sharing their experiences with self tracking in the Dublin Quantified Self meetup evenings.
What is the Quantified Self?
The Quantified Self is simply self-trackers coming together in meetup events around the world where they can meet & share what they’re tracking and what they’ve learned.
Quantified Self tag-line is ‘self knowledge through numbers’. Using apps, tracking devices, logging data on our behaviours, we can grow to understand ourselves better & improve.
Founded in San Francisco by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly from the Wired magazine in 2009, there are now over 100 meetup groups with conferences being run regularly in the US & Europe.
While it started with fitness wearables, its grown to include tracking sleep, health, productivity, mood and even creating art from tracking data, as exhibited in the Science Gallery last year.
Biohacking is a close cousin of the Quantified Self movement where self tracking is being used along with diet & lifestyle ‘hacks’ to improve health & fitness with the maximum gain for minimum effort.
Dublin’s Quantified Self
Dublin’s branch of the Quantified Self has been running since 2011, running meetup evenings every 1–2 months in the Trinity Science Gallery. Evenings are generally small informal events with 2–3 speakers.
Format of the evening can be ’show & tell’ talks, where members discuss what they’ve been tracking and what they’ve learned from the experience. Previous show & tells have had people sharing their findings on fitness tracking, how to work more productively and app developers creating new apps and technologies for the wearable space.
We’ve also had talks by experts in the fields of sleep science, nutrition, and blood tracking and how to apply that knowledge to improve our own health & fitness.
Quantified Self evenings are also a great place to meet new people of similar interests & share learnings.
Quantified Self Dublin will be running the next meetup on Tuesday 23rd August at 6.30 PM where we’ll be presenting the results of a recent survey run in the Dublin QS community — what people in Dublin are tracking, why and what motivates them.
We’ll also be discussing Quantified Self in healthcare, how people from around the world are already using Quantified Self tools to help manage chronic diseases, and the future of healthcare with
Links
- You can find Quantified Self Dublin on meetup, on Twitter or on Facebook.
- You can find out more information on Quantified Self on their website here.
- The Quantified Self site has a guide to Quantified Self for newbies.
