Starting in the mid 70’s until the mid 80’s, a group of nerdy folks met regularly in Silicon Valley to talk about personal projects with hard-to-use, clunky, and unfriendly machines called computers. They were called the Homebrew Computer Club, and while their interests seemed crazy at the time, they were laying the groundwork for the personal computer revolution that has changed all of our lives. I’m always wondering, in 30 years time, what will have been the equivalent group of the present time?

There’s a few candidates, like the open source community hanging out at Github, or the DIY folks reading magazines like Make and posting projects on Kickstarter. But being obsessed with building tools to measure and improve human health, I’m most fascinated by the movement called Quantified Self.

QS is all about constantly measuring indicators of health, like body movement, weight, heart rate, and meals. People have done this informally for a long time (e.g. food diaries), but the willpower and discipline required turned off all but the most determined. This is now changing. In the past few years, three huge trends have made self-tracking easy and fun for endlessly curious people like me. First, the costs of the technology required to automate these measurements has plummeted, because popular consumer devices like the Nintendo Wii have commoditized sensors like accelerometers. Second, the social web and app economy have driven development of open APIs, and demonstrated how awesome sharing digital data can be for consumers and companies alike. Third, mobile devices like the iPhone combine multiple sensors with the computational power, connectivity, and interactivity to make data accessible and meaningful.

I’m just beginning to pay attention to this community, but I’m already sure it will spawn cool things in the future. Like personal computers, these products will first be used by techy early adopters and people with specialized needs, like elite athletes, but will eventually have a much broader impact. I recently bought a Fitbit, a pedometer that syncs wirelessly with my laptop, and I’m sharing my daily step tallies through a Google spreadsheet. Thanks to Ernesto Ramirez for posting instructions on using a script by John McLaughlin to automate exports of data from Fitbit to a Google Spreadsheet.