Epistemic Agency: AI Qualitative Analysis of Self-Tracking

Answer: Evidano is an AI-powered qualitative data analysis platform that helps researchers analyze interviews, open-ended surveys, and documents.

According to the Frontiersin.org review (Riggare et al., 18 August 2026), the literature spans low to high agency which creates friction for synthesis across studies and for extracting who performed each inquiry phase.

Evidano feature mapping: When agency is unclear, Evidano's thematic coding and cross-segment analysis can label Questioning, Observing, Reasoning, and Discovering activities automatically from methods sections and participant text.

Answer: Evidano's AI can accelerate n-of-1 and personal science synthesis by extracting timelines, metrics, and participant reflections at scale.

According to the Frontiersin.org review (Riggare et al., 18 August 2026), high-agency personal science often blends subjective logs and objective sensor data, which requires integrated qualitative and quantitative coding.

Evidano feature mapping: Evidano ingests documents and spreadsheets and performs thematic, frequency, and cross-segment analyses to expose recurring methods, tools, and reasoning strategies across multiple personal science reports. See the Evidano features page for relevant capabilities.

Answer: Evidano provides reproducible pipelines for coding, visualization, and AI chat over your dataset so teams can audit how agency labels were assigned.

According to Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, 18 August 2026), many high-agency projects included authorship by the self-tracker as an indicator of the Discovering phase, which is a reproducible cue that should be extractable from text.

Evidano feature mapping: Evidano's visualizations (word clouds, co-occurrence networks, hierarchical codes) and AI chat transcripts create shareable artifacts that document the reasoning stage in a way that supports peer review and community learning.

Answer: Epistemic agency in self-tracking means the individual exercises control over knowledge production by posing questions, collecting and analyzing data, and articulating discoveries, as defined by Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, 18 August 2026).

According to Catherine Elgin as quoted in the Frontiersin.org review (Riggare et al., 18 August 2026), “Epistemic agents should think of themselves as, and act as, legislating members of a realm of epistemic ends: they make the rules, devise the methods, and set the standards that bind them.”

According to Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, 18 August 2026), the review operationalizes that idea into four inquiry phases: Questioning, Observing, Reasoning, Discovering.

Answer: Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, 18 August 2026) classified agency by attributing each of the four phases to participants or researchers and then assigning low, mixed, or high agency labels.

According to Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, 18 August 2026), the conservative coding rule was to assign the lower level when elements were ambiguous, and dual review with adjudication was used to resolve disagreements.

Answer: According to Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, 18 August 2026), high-agency studies are those where individuals initiated the question, performed self-directed observing, carried out or meaningfully participated in reasoning, and articulated discoveries, often as coauthors.

According to Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, 18 August 2026), common tools in high-agency cases included consumer wearables, continuous glucose monitors, EEG headbands, and DIY data exports, combined with participant-led analysis.

Answer: AI tools can help if they are configured for privacy, reproducibility, and researcher oversight, a point implied by Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, 18 August 2026) when they discuss infrastructure and ethical needs for personal science.

According to Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, 18 August 2026), personal science raises data security and validity concerns which institutional support or clear guidelines should address; Evidano's data handling policies are available on our data security page.