I believe that self-tracking (of personal results given different longevity compounds/drugs) is very important for optimizing longevity. I’m very familiar with the Quantified Self people in the SF Bay Area, they do great stuff, I’ve met with Ernesto Ramirez (a community manager at the time), and founders of the QuantifiedSelf website, and they have done a lot to help all of us better quantify and measure key health metrics in ways that the current medical establishment does not. This new book seems like it might be helpful in these efforts:
His new book is a systematic summary of the key ideas and lessons of the quantified-self movement. Written with the help of other long-time quantified-self influencers, it’s liberally sprinkled with anecdotes from people who’ve applied the principles of science to their daily lives, sometimes in order to counter devastating illness.
The book’s co-author Sara Riggare, for instance, used a simple iPhone tapping game to track her Parkinson’s symptoms. Upon seeing patterns in how her symptoms varied throughout the day, she was able to adjust her medication schedule to optimize its effectiveness. NEO.LIFE wrote about the academic challenge to self-experimentation she encountered while self tracking for her PhD. We also meet Whitney Erin Boesel, who was concerned about her high blood cholesterol after pregnancy and used daily tracking to learn that her cholesterol levels varied significantly throughout her menstrual cycle. The wealth of data gave her confidence to spot meaningfully high levels against a background of variation.
Most of all, the book is a guide for the rest of us: How anyone can fine-tune their observation skills and hone record-keeping habits similar to the way professional scientists do—the learning to observe of the book’s subtitle.
Read the Neo.Life full article on this new book, Article by Richard Sprague:
Neo.Life Article Author: Richard Sprague
Healthtech startup veteran interested in Personal Science. I do data analysis in R and Python for several years’ worth of my own near-daily microbiome, continuous glucose monitoring, heart rate, sleep, and more.
https://richardsprague.com
https://twitter.com/sprague
Buy the Book here:
The book presents a step-by-step approach to exploring your personal questions with empirical methods.
It contains no advice whatsoever on what treatments or medicines or diets or vitamins or exercises are worth trying. Instead, it offers meta-advice; that is, advice on how to know if the things that you try actually work the way you expect, and advice about how to develop reasonable new ideas of things to try.
The goal of releasing this LeanPub version is to get the almost competed draft into the hands of people in the Quantified Self community and others who are keenly interested in the topic, so we can hear about what we may have gotten wrong and fix it. There is a minimum price of $8, and the entire purchase price will be devoted to maintaining self-research community resources, such as the show&tell archive at quantifiedself.com.
To comment, join the Personal Science Book discussion at forum.quantifiedself.com, send an email to gary@quantifiedself.com, or tweet at @quantifiedself.
