Self

Self is a health app built for people who want to understand their bodies in all their complexity, not force them into neat categories. It came out of Queering the Quantified Self, a research project that asked a simple but important question: who is self-tracking actually built for?

Most health apps assume a body that is stable, productive, measurable, and easy to classify. They are built around hidden norms about what counts as healthy, successful, or normal. Self was made for the bodies those systems routinely misread: queer bodies, trans bodies, chronically ill bodies, changing bodies, messy bodies.

It treats self-tracking not as a discipline of optimisation, but as a practice of care, curiosity, and autonomy. Not a tool for fixing yourself, but a way of paying attention.

Self allows people to track what actually matters to them, on their own terms. That might mean sleep, pain, moods, hormones, energy, environments, sensations, or things no mainstream app would think to ask about.

Rather than splitting health into isolated metrics, Self works from the idea that the body is an interconnected system. Physical, emotional, hormonal, and environmental factors shape each other. The point is not to produce a perfect record. It is to notice patterns, test hunches, and build knowledge over time.

Privacy is central to that process. All data stays on the device, encrypted and fully under the user’s control. There is no extraction, no profiling, and no silent sharing. Self treats privacy not as a technical extra, but as part of what makes honest self-research possible.

Health technologies are often sold as empowering while quietly demanding compliance. They ask people to track themselves, but only through narrow definitions of what a body is, how it should behave, and what it should be working towards.

Self pushes against that model. It refuses the idea that body data exists to optimise performance, feed platforms, or sort people against universal norms. It starts from a different reality: bodies are relational, inconsistent, affected by context, and often impossible to reduce to a clean dashboard.

That matters because the tools we use to understand ourselves are never neutral. They can reinforce shame, surveillance, and medical simplification, or they can make space for agency, complexity, and care.

Self is built on a clear principle: body data belongs to the person it comes from. The app does not ask people to adapt themselves to technology. It adapts technology to the lived reality of bodies, complicated, changing, and fully their own.