Quantified Self Uplevels to Quality of Life

The quantified self movement has barely gotten going in the last five years but contemporary shifts can already be seen such as the idea that the current activity is just an intermediary node on the way to the future exoself.

The quantified self refers to any individual engaged in the self-tracking of biological, physical, behavioral, or environmental information, often with a proactive stance towards action. At the center of the quantified self movement is, appropriately, the Quantified Self community with thousands of worldwide participants.

Quality of Life
A key contemporary shift is a push beyond the basic self-tracking of ‘steps walked’ and ‘hours slept’ to examine more complex qualitative phenomena like emotion, happiness, and productivity. The overall objective is to improve the quality of life.

CalmingTech
One example of improving the quality of life is by using ‘calming technologies’ to reduce stress. Whereas technology generally seems to speed things up, calming technologies do the opposite, helping to slow down and de-stress life.

The Calming Technology Lab at Stanford designs solutions to identify stressors, and respond to them by evoking a state of restful alertness in the individual. Calming technologies draw on the general principles of behavior design, where three aspects are required to produce a behavior change: sufficient motivation, sufficient ability, and a trigger. Calming technology is essentially a quantified personal stress management system.

Core Calming Principles
The CalmingTech lab has suggested ten core design principles to use in creating calming technologies, including reducing feelings of overwhelm, and having the ability to control interruptions. 

NewTech, ArtTech, CalmingTech…what could be next? HumorTech? SerendipityTech? 

The Evolution of the Quantified Self into the Qualified Self and the Extended Exoself

The Quantified Self is a fast-growing movement of individuals who are interested in personalized knowledge through self-tracking. So far, 5,000 QS’ers have come together at 70 worldwide meetup groups to share the details of their projects, discussing what they did, how they did it, and what they learned. Three areas were thematized at the group’s third conference held at Stanford University, September 15-16, 2012:

• The need for a data commons where participants may contribute personalized self-tracking data streams 
• Improving quality of life by tracking impact rather than actions in areas such as mood, happiness, productivity, well-being, and goal-achievement 
• The notion of current QS activities being an intermediary step towards the development of an extended self with exosenses like augmented reality vision overlays and haptic data that can be perceived as a sensation

The Quantified Self becomes the Qualified Self and the Exoself

Quotable quotes from the third Quantified Self conference held at Stanford University September 15-16, 2012. 

• Can I query my shirt or am I limited to consuming the querying that comes packaged in my shirt?
• Quantified Self enables the constant creation of this thing called the self
• We think more about our cats/dogs than we do our real pets, our microbiome
• Information conveyance, not dataviz
• Quantified emotion and data sensation (haptics)
• Display of numerical data and graphs are the interface
• Quantifying is the intermediary step...exosenses (haptics, wearable electronic senses) is really what we want
• Perpetual data explosion
• Our mission as Quantified Selves is to discover our mission

Figure 1. Word Cloud Visualization of Agenda Topics at the third Quantified Self Conference.