WIRED: The monitor device I'm wearing mainly gives me an insight into my own backsliding
I DON’T really see myself as the jewellery-wearing kind, so the occasional glimpse of myself in mirrors with a weedy string necklace around my collarline is a bit of a jolt. Who is this handsome, yet clearly vain and slightly hippyish older gentleman?
Hanging off the end of that string is my reductionist attempt to find out.
Attached is a Fitbit, a small blue clip that conceals a pedometer and a small wireless transceiver.
The Fitbit monitors my movements during the day, and when I come within a few feet of my home computer, transmits and uploads my wanderings to a website. Every footstep I take is tracked, as well as the stairs I climb, and even how much I thrash around during sleep.
Does that sound a little self-obsessed to you? I feel the same way. But how
much
do I feel that? Could I perhaps monitor my own sense of embarrassment on an Excel spreadsheet, upload it somewhere else, and then divine whether I should keep tracking myself or give in to the public shame of being this self-regarding?
The truth is that recording your footfalls is – almost literally – the first step along a long road of automatically monitoring and archiving the parts of one’s life that blogging and tweeting don’t capture.
Jawbone, the bluetooth headset manufacturers, have just launched Up, a €50 bracelet that ties to your iPhone and can buzz you awake when you’re sleeping lightly, as well as count your steps. The Zeo sleep manager takes the somnolent data-trawl more seriously, and studiously records your brainwaves for later analysis.
They’re all marketed as health gadgets. But is it that healthy to track everything you do? The Quantified Self movement, as it (reflexively) calls itself, thinks so: and if anyone has the evidence to prove it, they would.
Founded by journalists Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly in the Bay Area, Quantified Self is a distributed set of meetings where statistically inclined self-improvers share their tips for measuring and modifying their own behaviour. It doesn’t need high-tech tools: many have been recording their own habits on paper for years. But it does require a trust in being able to turn the stats into long-lasting change.
I don’t actually think this kind of self-monitoring is self-obsession. On the contrary, the more these tools automate the tedious job of data-collection, the less compulsively fascinated you need to be.
It feels more like bringing the positive aspects of obsessive fact-collation to a wider audience. As long as these devices track what I’m doing, I don’t have to.
Which, of course, is part of the problem. They say diets work not because of the ingredients, but because they give us an excuse to spend more time thoughtfully considering how and what we put into our bodies. Passive data collection only works if there’s a way to turn it into action.
Am I any fitter thanks to Fitbit? Sad to say, the device mainly gives me an insight into my own backsliding. With all the graphs and archives that the Fitbit gives me, my main new insight is to be able to precisely watch my peaks and troughs as I struggle to inject a bit of exercise into my sedentary life.
Which brings us to the next potential step in the commercialisation of the Quantified Self. Collecting statistics is the easy part. What I really need is an automated way to apply real scientific tools to this mass of data.
I don’t have the skill to understand raw data, and I don’t have the objectivity to apply its harsh lessons to my own life without a little help. It’s not enough to tell me how far I’ve run. I want something – or perhaps someone – to help me spot the bad habits that precede my lack of exercise, and some support to help me fix those habits.
Services such as Fitbit, and web-based competitors such as Fitocracy and RunKeeper, provide this additional psychological fillip with social features. Hardware and software track my habits, but it’s my friends that help me change the bad ones.
It’s certainly a basic and universal truth that you can get fit or improve yourself in other ways more quickly and for longer with collegial support.
But the real opportunity here lies in mining for individual truths, not generalisations. My body and my mind operate very differently from even my friends, and respond to different encouragements.
To be honest, I’m not the sort of person who gets motivated from a few graphs and some happy emoticons from a friend or two.
But the promise with quantifying yourself – rather than have a doctor work on a plan based on a generalised model of everyone else – is that we can derive better, individual models.
That won’t come from just hardware, websites or social networking. It will come from the medical industry and individuals, working together, building software for the purpose.
The question is: will the medical industry see the move to individual self-diagnosis and treatment as an opportunity, or a challenge to its own established methods? And if not, are small start-ups and technology manufacturers enough to take them on?
