The Data of You
Tracking your life through wearable technology
We are our data.
For decades, our desktop PCs have helped us crunch numbers, from business plans to our bank accounts. Now though, new sensors, social networks, online data repositories, and even wearable devices like the Moto 360 have made it practical and much easier to collect and analyze data about something we care about more than anything else in our lives: ourselves. We can look at our bodies, minds, and spirits through the lens of data and leverage what we learn to improve the quality of our lives.
Prior to the commercialization of wearables and the explosion of Web apps, tracking and analyzing your daily step count or sleep patterns involved a lot of discipline and a big spreadsheet. More advanced tracking called for pricey medical devices. In the last few years though, the ability to use digital tools for collecting, calculating, and even sharing day-to-day data has become a matter of will, not means. Devices like the Moto 360 do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to. As a result, the ancient maxim to “know thyself” can be taken literally. And it has been, by a loose movement called the Quantified Self.
In 2007, tech journalists and big thinkers Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, both veterans of Wired magazine, set out to gather and galvanize the individuals and groups who were pioneering these novel methods and uses of self-tracking.
“We were just kind of putting a circle, drawing a frame around a community that was inventing things together,” says Wolf, who with Kelly, co-founded Quantified Self Labs that produces conferences, forums, and guides around self-tracking. “Now we’re seeing probably tens of millions of people engaged in Quantified Self practices and discovering what those are good for, and that’s an amazing development.”
Early self-quantifiers were remarkably inventive, making use of any available sensing technologies they could acquire or hack together and designing sophisticated systems for teasing meaning from the logged data. Many would convene online to discuss what they’d found and suggest ways to optimize their lives for myriad benefits, from better sleep to improved productivity to the management of diseases like diabetes.
“Our point of view is we’re not here to serve our tools, but our tools are here to serve us,” Wolf says.
To bring that sense of empowerment to everyone, the tools themselves must be ubiquitous, unobtrusive, and dead simple to use. Take Motorola’s new Moto 360, a sleek timepiece outfitted with an array of sensors that deliver fitness-based Quantified Self applications. A pedometer and heart rate monitor feed data to Moto Body, a wrist-based activity tracker application that monitors steps, distance, heart rate, and calories burned to offer users an insight into their daily activities. Moto Body automatically makes the data actionable through intuitive graphic nudges that encourage the wearer to improve performance step by step, literally.
“We want to try and learn about the user holistically and passively without being in their face, and turn those insights around into something that’ll help them live a healthier life,” says Moto Body product manager Noel Kirthiraj. “Once you get into it the habit of tracking yourself, you see that you can change your life a bit by bit and make meaningful progress over time. And that becomes addictive.”
Moto Body’s integration into the wristwatch form factor eliminates the need to wear or carry an additional device. Yet no matter how stylish or user-friendly the device may be, accuracy is the key to its uptake.
“If the data is not accurate, the information provided to the user is not going to be meaningful, and you would lose trust pretty quickly,” Kirthiraj says. “With Motorola’s strength in low-power sensors, and focus of innovating at the cusp of hardware and software, we believe we can truly achieve a meaningful granularity and precision of data and deliver a compelling user experience with Moto Body.”
Years ago, the Quantified Self movement identified that one of the most important affordances of wearable computing is how the digital technology can increase our understanding of our analog lives. And that the next personal computing revolution may take place right on our bodies.
“This is going to be as ubiquitous as computing,” Wolf says. “It is computing. It’s just small mobile computing that we turn to our own purposes. People used to think computers were for administrative, scientific, managerial purposes, but then they realized computers are for self-knowledge, self-discovery, self-expression, and communication.”
