Open health with the quantified self

Beyond the walls of our constrained health system, there is a movement that could change the entire context of healthcare. While the US health system struggles to open patient health data and to allow for better data sharing among providers, the self-tracking movement, known as the "quantified self," could soon make all those efforts for naught.

Charted patient health data continues to remain mostly inaccessible to the very patients from whom it was collected, so some have decided to start collecting their own data. Self-trackers are part of a robust culture that is experimenting with sensor-based tracking of everything about their health from heart rate to sleep to metabolism and diet. And they are collecting this data quickly, easily, and cheaply...