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Quantified Self weekly links: Meet the woman who wears 21 fitness trackers

The Quantified Self space is moving so fast that it can be hard to keep up, so here are some of the best links we found in the past week about making and breaking habits and tracking your life.

Photo credit: Theophilos

1. The Extremely Quantified Self: Meet Rachel Kalmar, Who Wears 21 Fitness Trackers at the Same Time

Rachel has some great ideas about where the movement might be headed:

What Kalmar would like is for her daily measurements — and their deviations from her norm and from her goals — to trigger something in her environment.

For example, Kalmar dreams of a digital mood ring, where a lack of her measured experience of sunlight leads to a boost in ambient indoor lighting, in order to avoid Seasonal Affective Disorder.

2. To bed—an alarm clock to make you go to sleep

Sooner or later, there comes a time when mothers may not be around every day to wake us up, but our smartphones sure are. To bed is an alarm app that reminds you to go to sleep, just like she did.

3. Broadening your focus to improve your mood

Tynan tells a great story about how he found the bright side of getting his motorcycle impounded:

That’s the difference between being moody and being even-keeled. A moody person bases their mental state on a very narrow set of influences on their life. An even-keeled person bases their mental state on the sum total of influences, or at least a much wider set.

4. Shall we kill spam with a charge for posting?

An interesting discussion on the Quantified Self forums about dealing with spam comments:

Paid spammers need to make a living too, so they think hard about how to succeed. It is very hard to outwit them with simple technical solutions like quizzes and captchas.

5. How to Have Quality Sleep Effortlessly

For those of you trying to improve your sleeping habits:

The good news is that it is in your power to make effortless sleep a reality. By tweaking your lifestyle and attitude to sleep, you can improve your chances of getting good quality rest, regularly.

6. Health-Monitoring App Turns Vital Signs Into Personalized Music

BioBeats already has one product, Pulse, which involves holding your finger over the iPhone camera so it can detect your heartbeat choose an appropriate genre for your current activity level. Soon it will also release BioMuse, which builds whole playlists of songs based on your body’s signals.