Wikipedia makes this definition [1]:
'The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person's daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical). Such self-monitoring and self-sensing, which combines wearable sensors (EEG, ECG, video, etc.) and wearable computing, is also known as lifelogging. Other names for using self-tracking data to improve daily functioning are “self-tracking”, "auto-analytics", “body hacking” and “self-quantifying”'.

As far as PD is concerned self-tracking could include factors such as tremor frequency and amplitude, arm movement speed, distance walked, blink rate, voice loudness, defecation rates, and a million other factors besides.

Acquiring this data would in the past have required costly lab equipment. However much of this, from computers to accelerometers, from video to EEG, is now cheap and commonplace amongst PwP. Moreover, the explosive growth of the internet makes it possible to communicate our findings.

But, just because something can be done, doesn't necessarily mean that it should be done. So, is there any evidence that self-tracking benefits PwP?

I must admit to a bias. For me it is self evident that it is beneficial to collect data about your Parkinson's symptoms.

I'm interested in hearing people's experiences, good and bad, of self-tracking.

Finally, as an example of what I do, here's a graph of my side-to-side finger tapping test results for the last year or so.

weatherRaw.png

Reference:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_Self

John

John
Two weeks ago I attended a lecture by a visiting academic from Sweden on informetrics. One comment he made was that the two revolutions in health he predicted in the next 10 years would be related to advancing genome knowledge and secondly information technology and informetrics in health and self tracking must be a part of this.

I don't have a story to tell about measuring self but here is one I received today. Its not this whole story but its in there and its a tapping story too.

http://www.journalofparkinsonsdiseas...rspective.html

dilmar,

Thanks for the leads.

I very much like this from your link:

"Like most people with Parkinson’s, Sara [Riggare] sees her neurologist every six months for a 30-minute session, and thus spends about one hour in total per year being observed. That leaves, she says, 8,756 hours per year of self care; time when she and others with Parkinson’s experience symptoms, but when nobody’s paying attention."

John