NEW YORK CITY – Big Data is all around us. It’s in the way we shop, do our finances, and tweet. What does Big Data even mean, you ask?

To some, it’s more information than your laptop can handle. Others define it as melding data from different sources and seeing what patterns emerge.

“I’m a photographer, so that [explanation] didn’t mean much to me,” said Rick Smolan Oct. 15 here at the inaugural Wired Health Conference in New York.

Then the Against All Odds Productions CEO ran into Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer. She described Big Data, he said, as “watching the planet develop a nervous system.”

And that nervous system of data is developing at tremendous rates thanks to growth factors like social media, gadgets that record how much electricity each appliance in your house eats up, consumer genomics, and personal trackers like Fitbit, Zeo or the Nike fuel bracelet (a favorite among Wired staff, according to executive editor Thomas Goetz).

“The challenge is ... how do you make it something [people] care about?” asked Smolan. As the popularity of Instagram indicates, often, the answer is pictures. So through the Human Face of Big Data, Smolan aims to morph abstract data points into something visceral, emotional and tangible. The crowd-sourced venture capitalizes “on humanity’s new ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data, in real time,” according to the project’s website.

And as self-quantifiers Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf mentioned in a later session at the conference, people are measuring everything from their sleeping patterns to how fast their toenails grow.

They’re using devices as varied as smartphones, headbands, cars that track their own health and the health of their driver, and carpets that monitor a person’s balance and gait.

“If she hasn’t touched the carpet, the system sends me a message. No cameras, no invasion of privacy,” said Smolan about the experimental “magic carpet.”

These kinds of personal tracking devices begin to address the “big challenge [of] expanding the scope of big data in healthcare to encompass an individual’s environment outside the walls of the clinic or hospital,” wrote Joel Dudley, director of biomedical informatics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, in an email to Wired.

They also give ordinary people the opportunity to craft scientific and health-related questions, not just provide answers, said Quantified Self Co-Founder Gary Wolf.

Or as Quantified Self adviser and self-care app developer Rajiv Mehta put it online, personal tracking is doing to healthcare what the PC did to computing: It liberated it “from the province of an elite few to a tool for the masses.”

These data-hungry gadgets also harness “the power of connecting people with their own data and getting them to see how that could change their lives,” said Goetz.

With the deluge of data they provide, however, comes other challenges, including how that data is analyzed and interpreted.

“We don’t have really good drag-and-drop statistical analysis tools,” Kelly said. “To do something meaningful with [the data], to extract out some kind pattern ... is very difficult.”

As any frustrated graduate student will tell you, without the proper analysis even good data loses its zing.

Wired Health speaker Stephen Wolfram, for example, has been collecting personal data for more than two decades, but not until recently did he "finally try taking a look – and to use [himself] as an experimental subject for studying what one might call “personal analytics,” he wrote on his blog. But Wolfram, who earned his PhD in theoretical physics at 20, is a whiz. The rest of us might need some help.

The federal government has acknowledged this predicament and recently set aside more than $200 million to fund big data initiatives. Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded about $15 million to fund eight big data research projects.

The awards will “ultimately help accelerate research to improve health – by developing methods for extracting important, biomedically relevant information from large amounts of complex data,” said NIH Director Francis Collins in a press release.

Other researchers are mining social media data to monitor the adverse effects of certain medications, and the NIH has also put the data from the 1000 Genomes Project in the cloud for other scientists to use.

As tracking becomes even more mainstream, the issue of privacy will pop up. While Smolan doesn’t think big data equals Big Brother, others may disagree.

“The conversation on privacy will need to change dramatically in the near future. It will not be long before you will be able to take a picture of someone with your phone camera and have software that can impute regions of that person's genomic DNA, which could tell you about their risk for disease,” Dudley wrote in an email.

There’s also the question of who owns the data, the patient, healthcare providers, or the app developers that tell you want it means.

Self-trackers “want to use these sensors ... to give us new senses, to equip us with new ways to hear our bodies,” Kelly says, but with those senses comes a lot of responsibility, too.