Welcome

I’m very pleased to welcome you to the first Quantifed Self Symposium on Pain. The goal of our meeting is to explore how the ideas, tools, and methods of the Quantifed Self can help people who suffer from pain every day. We have been deeply inspired by the resilience and ingenuity we’ve seen in friends and colleagues dealing with pain, and we hope our meeting fulfills its high aim, which is to catalyze the emergence of genuinely new approaches that can benefit millions.

The symposium is based around a unique innovation challenge, designed to unfold from start to finish over the course of a single day. Instead of a lengthy entry process, with winners decided behind closed doors, we have programmed an open conversation about what we are learning, a discovery-based event where participation itself is of real value.

Among the 55 participants in the meeting are device makers, app developers, authors, scientists, and industry experts. Twelve companies are presenting challenge entries. Each will have the podium for 15 minutes, but all will actively be part of the discussion and evaluation. This is truly a peer-driven process. We’ve been guided in this work by theory of innovation that can be expressed in a single sentence: the key catalyst to innovation is direct personal connection between individuals who can make a difference. We hope you get great benefit from the symposium and challenge, and we’re honored to be learning alongside you.

About the Quantified Self and QS Labs

The Quantified Self is a collaboration among users and makers of self-tracking tools that was founded in 2008. Today there are over 110 Quantified Self groups in more than 30 countries, where people get together to share what they are doing with their own data, answering three simple questions: What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? Quantified Self Labs is a California-based social enterprise created in 2011 to provide organizational backing for the QS movement. We convene meetings, publish resources, and write free software. Our mission is to support new discoveries about ourselves and our communities that are grounded in accurate observation and enlivened by a spirit of friendship.