With Open Humans we are not only working to empower you to decide with whom to share your personal data – but also to explore your own data. With our latest project addition – the Personal Data Notebooks – we are taking a further step in that direction. Based on the increasingly popular Jupyter Notebooks they bring together data analysis code, documentation and data visualization. With the added twist that the Personal Data Notebooks also easily provide simple and private access to your personal data that is stored in Open Humans. Which not only makes it easy to write and use a data analysis – it also makes it easy to share your results without having to share your personal data with someone else. That way you can not only learn about yourself and your data, but also about how data analyses are performed.

If you want to write your own data analysis for the notebooks from scratch you can get started in Python, R or Julia. Or if you want to tweak or run existing data analysis you can use and adapt existing notebooks. In the simplest case you don’t even have to write/edit any code, as the input data are standardized according to their Open Humans data source. So for example you can easily run a Fitbit analysis notebook written by someone else right away on your own Fitbit data. To get you started we have a step-by-step guide on how to use the Personal Data Notebooks, along with a set of ready-to-use data analysis notebooks for Fitbit, Apple Health, Moves, 23andMe and Twitter archive data.

But this is just the start. We can’t wait to see what kind of analysis notebooks the community will come up with. To kick off the development of additional notebooks we are running a small competition. Submit your own personal data notebooks until May 27th and our judges will select the most interesting submissions to add them to our example notebooks. For this competition Steven Jonas, Azure Dominique and Gary Wolf of QuantifiedSelf.com have agreed to be our judges! If you need an inspiration for your notebooks you can take a look at already proposed notebook ideas and discuss your ideas on Slack.