Personal science is a term used by the late psychologist and scientist

Seth Roberts Seth Roberts (August 17 1953 - April 26 2014) was a professor of psychology at Tsinghua University in Beijing and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of the bestselling book ''The Shangri- ...

, who defined it as: "''using science to solve your own problems''". Associated fields are

self-experimentation Self-experimentation refers to the special case of single-subject research in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on themselves. Usually this means that a single person is the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter ...

citizen science Citizen science (CS) (similar to community science, crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science, participatory monitoring, or volunteer monitoring) is scientific research conducted with participation from the public (who are sometimes re ...

. The concept has been further developed within the

Quantified Self The quantified self refers both to the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with technology and to a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools who share an interest in "self-knowledge through numbers". Quantified self practices overlap ...

community. The first use of the term in a scientific publication was in 2016, where it was associated with: "''an interest in collecting data about their own bodies or lives in order to obtain insights into their everyday health or performance".'' In 2017, the scientific journal

Methods of Information in Medicine ''Methods of Information in Medicine'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in medical informatics. It is an official journal of the International Medical Informatics Association, the European Federation for Medical Informatics ...

published a focus theme on single subject (N-of-1) research design, which also included personal science. The editorial introducing the focus theme is titled "''Single Subject (N-of-1) Research Design, Data Processing, and Personal Science"'' is co-authored by Gary Wolf, who together with Kevin Kelly coined the phrase ''the quantified self''. In the editorial, personal science was described as "''self-directed N-of-1 studies''". In 2020, Wolf further developed the term together with Martijn de Groot in an article titled "''A Conceptual Framework for Personal Science''". They defined personal science as "''the practice of using empirical methods to explore personal questions''". In a 2021 scientific article building on the previous ones, personal science is defined as: "''the practice of exploring personally consequential questions by conducting self-directed N-of-1 studies using a structured empirical approach''".

History

The history of personal science is derived from several sources, one of which is the 1958 book ''Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy'' by

Michael Polanyi Michael Polanyi (; hu, Polányi Mihály; 11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism supplies ...

. His work especially highlighted the tacit and subjective dimensions of conventional scientific practices. Building on Polanyi's work, Martin and Brouwer introduced the term personal science in the 1993 article ''Exploring personal science'',{{Cite journal, last1=Martin, first1=B., last2=Brouwer, first2=W., date=1993, title=Exploring personal science, url=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.3730770407, journal=Science Education, language=en, volume=77, issue=4, pages=441–459, doi=10.1002/sce.3730770407, bibcode=1993SciEd..77..441M, issn=0036-8326 as an approach for characterizing scientific practice for young students. They emphasized that ''“science is not simply rational and objective but that the inquiring person is an integral part of the enquiry.”''

References

Health informatics

History

See also

References