Institute For The Future

A new model: Crowd Self-Experiments

There's a new twist happening in the Quantified Self space. 

What was previously only individuals reporting on their data gathering and occasional self-experiments is now transforming into collectives. People are defining experiments to do on themselves as a group, then compare the data in a kind of crowdsourced research trial.

I've written before about the DIYBio movement, one of the signals we're tracking at IFTF. This is more like DITBio (Do It Together). Last week, Eri Gentry of BioCurious and Greg Biggers of Genomera announced a new study they're doing to try to replicate and expand professor Seth Roberts' self-experiment on butter improving math scores.

They're looking for volunteers to join them for the 24-day experiment. The results will be analyzed, hacked and visualized (and new studies brainstormed) during Science Hack Day, November 13-14, which will be held here at Institute for the Future.  You can join for the Science Hack Day portion only by registering here. 

Another example is the Low-Dose Naltrexone study happening at CureTogether. LDN is a drug that no one is studying because it is off-patent, but thousands of positive anecdotes abound for LDN helping in auto-immune conditions. Patients are coming together voluntarily to add rigor to anecdote.

I'm excited to see more crowd self-experiments happen. There will be the inevitable rise in regulations, restrictions, and opposition, but the potential for new knowledge with this model is too compelling to shut down completely. With the proper informed consent procedures in place, and ethical review of each study, I think a balance can be found to allow this research to continue.

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Discuss this post at @accarmichael or @IFTFHealth on Twitter.