As a quantified self blogger, I am always up for the challenge of using the latest tools and devices. However one tool has been around for a while, tracking people’s health and activity levels before it really became a thing. This tool is Microsoft’s Health Vault.

Health Vault is a dashboard for plugging in all the digital health devices a person uses. It can then display this information so you may see trends, share with friends, family or even your doctor and always have a log of your medical history to download.

I recently put together a five-part blog diary series for the Microsoft Health Blog UK, to help show how the tool may used, and why it is a good solution for quantified self fans. The series ended with the video above.

Read the blog posts on Microsoft Health UK:

• My week of quantified self: Day One
• My week of quantified self: Day Two
• My week of quantified self: Day Three
• My week of quantified self: Day Four
• My week of quantified self: Day Five

While the title of the post is intentionally provocative, the issue is important; if people, in their millions, are generating data on their bodies, then withholding this from scientific research is a selfish act.

Read the full article on One More Life Life, where I also put forward the concept of a Creative Commons for body data.

Anywhere Working Week is an annual push to focus media attention on the need for more flexible working policy in businesses in the UK.

This year the week falls between March 18th – 22nd. We will be touring the UK during the week, putting on five events on five consecutive days. The last event takes place in London Transport Museum, followed by an evening meetup in the disused Aldwych underground station.

Find out more about Anywhere Working Week here.

My birthday is one of many. I will have plenty of opportunity to receive presents in the future and thankfully I can afford the things I might have asked for as birthday presents (so long as I don’t ask for a car!) The villagers in Ethiopia, where the money I raise will be going, also do not care about birthday presents – because they don’t even have clean water to give to their children. But they do care that Charity:Water ask people to give up their birthdays in return for donations.

Read more about why I am doing this and find out how to donate on my blog.

I started the blog One More Life Hack in 2012 to create a new platform in the UK for discussing the latest life hack that is the quantified self movement. 2013 has been reported to be the year that the quantified self and digital health become a mainstream phenomenon.

The quantified self is the process in which people track their daily lives, including elements of their mind, body and soul, to better understand themselves and carry out changes to create improvements in their lives.

As one of the first quantified self blogs in the UK, the community has grown fast, with over 3,000 pageviews per month after less than 6 months of creation.

View the blog at onemorelifehack.com.

I have recently given a lot of thought to how I should manage my social presence and which sites I need for this. It is part OCD when it comes to clutter, whether that is real world or in the digital world, and partly to solve the problem of out of date information.

Read more about the streamlining process on my blog.

Converge+UK is a series of silicon roundabout meetup events for the design, tech and business industry. The aim is to bring the three disciplines together, for better convergence so that we may better learn from each other and respect each other’s work.

I co-founded the meetup events, along with original founders Peter Thompson and Klaus Bravenboer, setting up the first events which received audiences of over 50 people per event, in locations such as The Hub, Innovation Warehouse and Google Campus.

Find out more at the Meet Up community, here.

Anywhere Working is an initiative led by a consortium of partners, including Microsoft, Intel and Nokia, to inspire people to work from anywhere and empower them to ask the companies they work for to implement more flexible working policies.

To highlight how you really can work from anywhere, with just a mobile phone and laptop, we created the Anywhere Working Mobile Office; a rickshaw that went around London for the day picking up busy commuters and taking them to and from the office, while managing to carry on working.

Watch the video above to see how the day went and find out more on Anywhere Working’s website.

There are many ways people may track different elements of their life and plenty of people are doing this already without realising they are quantified selfers.

Find out more about the quantified self, what it is and how to get involved, in my article on Anywhere Working.

Using social media for personal relationships is not the same as using it for professional relationships, nor does it relate to how a brand may use social media. There are also different layers that are uncovered once you begin using social media for brands – apps, pages, integration into websites; all elements you do not come across as just a mere user.

As I kick off the social media feature on Behind The Spin, I discuss why it is important that students become more active in their use of digital platforms.