AI for Qualitative Analysis of Quantified Self

The Frontiers review by Riggare et al., available at Frontiersin.org (Aug 18, 2026), shows that self-tracking in health spans low- to high-epistemic-agency practices and that distinguishing agency depends on identifying who originated the question.

• A literature search in Web of Science and PubMed performed in April–May 2025 returned 721 records, and Riggare et al. retained 241 full papers for analysis (Frontiersin.org, Aug 18, 2026).
• Among those papers, 46 used self-tracking as the data-collection method and were classified by agency level as 17 low-agency, 10 mixed-agency, and 19 high-agency articles (Frontiersin.org, Aug 18, 2026).
• Riggare et al. operationalize agency with a four-phase personal science cycle: Questioning, Observing, Reasoning, Discovering (framework described in Frontiersin.org, Aug 18, 2026).
• The review highlights a practical distinction: "who owns the question" determines whether self-tracking is measurement only or personal science (Riggare et al., Frontiersin.org, Aug 18, 2026).

The Frontiersin.org review (Aug 18, 2026) applied a four-phase framework to classify epistemic agency across studies that used the search term "quantified self" in April–May 2025.

According to Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, Aug 18, 2026), the authors merged design and observing into a four-phase cycle (Questioning, Observing, Reasoning, Discovering) to reflect how personal scientists actually iterate in practice.

According to Frontiersin.org (Aug 18, 2026), studies were coded conservatively by two authors and disagreements (13% at abstract screening, 17% at detailed review stages) were resolved by consensus, yielding 241 papers for full analysis and 46 papers that used self-tracking as the data source.

The Frontiers review also cites Catherine Elgin when defining epistemic agency: "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" (Catherine Elgin, quoted in Riggare et al., Frontiersin.org, Aug 18, 2026).

Qualitative researchers should treat self-tracking artifacts as mixed-method n-of-1 data that require an agency lens to interpret, according to Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, Aug 18, 2026).

According to the Frontiers review (Aug 18, 2026), when participants originate questions (high agency) their logs and reflections function as both data and analytic insight, changing coding choices and validation expectations.

According to Riggare et al. (Frontiersin.org, Aug 18, 2026), UX teams designing self-tracking studies must document who designed goals and who interprets outputs because the review found that data-sharing dominates low-agency studies while sharing of methods and learnings dominates high-agency reports.

According to Frontiersin.org (Aug 18, 2026), ethics and infrastructure matter: personal science often sits outside institutional oversight, so researchers should pre-specify data security, consent, and analytic transparency when working with self-trackers.

The Frontiers review (Riggare et al., Frontiersin.org, Aug 18, 2026) provides a practical agency framework you can apply to transcripts, logs, and n-of-1 records to distinguish measurement from self-directed knowledge production.

Teams using qualitative methods should tag phase ownership and combine subjective notes with objective streams to surface high-agency personal science cases for deeper analysis.

To prototype that workflow, map your corpus to the four-phase schema, run thematic and cross-segment analyses, and then validate AI-flagged high-agency cases with human review.

Ready to try an AI workflow built for qualitative and personal science analysis? Try Evidano for free.