A Quantified Life is the Life for me

Sorry for this late post!

So firstly I thought I should quickly say that I somehow missed this activity and I'm still trying to understand how. To make up for it, I am posting it now and I apologise to everyone for this late post. We're talking about the Quantified Self, so hope you read it through.

The Quantified Self

What in the world are you on about this week Brian? Well let me educate you on what I've discovered about this topic. My research led me to a site called livescience which informed me that:

"The quantified-self movement refers to the increasing use of technology to collect data about oneself.

These technologies — such as smartphone apps, GPS devices, and physical activity trackers with accelerometers — allow individuals to track all aspects of their daily lives, including their total activity, number of steps, food they eat, amount of sleep, heart rate, and mood."

I personally have used several of these softwares and tools. I might have used even more and just not noticed it yet, that's how easily these tools integrate themselves into your life. One of the main reasons why people currently use Lifelogging tools is to improve their quality of life, as Nancy Messieh from the makeuseof website tells us. Lifelogging tools are great at keeping track of a users' fitness level and more, by tracking how many steps they take a day, the amount of calories they lose while running on a treadmill, a user's diet and so on. 

I decided to try out a tool

Google Now

Google Now is a software that is installed on certain android phones that provides the user with the right information at the right time. If a user has a hobby outside of the house that occurs the same time every week, this software will connect that with the location of the user during this time and then notify the user whenever the next event starts coming up the following week. It warns the user when they should leave so as to get to the location in time. It's a rather intuitive piece of software that is always entertaining to use and the possibilities for this sort of application is endless. Google has once again found created another great application which they can happily add to their collection of great pieces of software.

Google Now also shows you other pieces of information that the user may find useful by keeping track of what the user has searched up on google recently. It then provides links to the web of other information that is similar to the one that the user was looking at before. 

I rather enjoyed using this application, and will definitely make much more use of it throughout the rest of my time with an android phone. I reckon it's got a big future ahead of it.

Me as a Quantified Self Devotee

I truthfully don't believe that I class as a Quantified Self Devotee. Sure I have access to some of these tools and apps that exist, and I do make use of some of them, but I don't usually use the information that is then gained to further my own goals in health and fitness/the many other options that you can use this information for. So though I collect the information, I don't make use of it, and don't notice half of the tools/apps that are tracking my activities. The use of Google Now has definitely impacted my life socially though. It helps me out with when I should leave a certain location to make it in time to the next location, it provides updates on topics I may have searched on Google beforehand, and that's still just scratching the surface of it. This is just 1 of the tools I use as well.

I'm currently endeavouring to use Lifelogging tools to improve my diet as well as health in the form of fitness, which are two of the more popular uses for a Lifelogging tool. Many different applications and tools have been created to help assist and track users in the gym, or out running in their neighbourhood. Who know's I might just even join all of these users out there with a device of my own. I might just buy a FitBit as well, so as to track my heart rate and distance that I've run.

Conclusion

To conclude everything that I've said above, Lifelogging tools are already reaching far and wide and are mainly used as health monitoring apps. Google Now is one of the apps that have been created that I researched this week to learn more about Lifelogging. I would highly recommend anyone in the market for a cool application to start using this one, a very intriguing tool indeed. What other lifelogging tools have you used? 

I also don't believe that I am a full Quantified Self Devotee seeing as I collect information but don't do anything with it after its collected. I probably have A LOT of information collected on myself, yet when it comes to achieving something out of the data collected, I always seem to find something better to do. But I have already deduced that I have quite a lot of tools and from just looking around my bedroom now, I can already confirm multiple such devices that support the Quantified Self movement. Are you also drowning in Lifelogging tools too? Leave a comment below!

And as always
This is Brian Fernandez

Signing Out