If You Can Quantify the Self, Can You Also Program It?

The Quantified Self health movement, once thought limited to elite athletes or patients suffering from chronic disease, has been steadily expanding beyond body hackers and body builders. Recent research on how the Internet is shaping healthcare from the Pew Internet and Life Project contained an eye-opening fact: fully one quarter of online adults were tracking their own health statistics. There's clearly something important going on here.

To learn more, I turned to Fred Trotter (@fredtrotter). Trotter and David Uhlman are writing a book on health information technology for O'Reilly, titled "Getting to Meaningful Use and Beyond."

Trotter has advanced the Quantified Self discussion one step further by asking, if you can quantify the self, can you also program it? He'll be talking about hacking yourself with open source software at the upcoming OSCON conference in Portland, Ore.

Our interview follows.