A Dashboard for Your Body | Hacker News Reader

A Dashboard for Your Body

nytimes.com

43 pointsswampthing8 comments

The day is not far when our every activity would be tracked by a chip implanted somewhere on our body, we would have an application that would collate all the data, tell us what we could have done better and what should be our next move, hackers would steal the data, sell it for millions to organizations relying on what their consumers really do and think, governments would keep track of all of us and somewhere down the line it would become mandatory for everyone to have one these chips, people would get used to it and forget would it was like in their ancestor's times when a man was free to think and do what he wanted even though it defied all the logic in the world.

Although Fitbit doesn’t explicitly acknowledge this in its marketing materials, the gadget makes you feel bad about yourself.

that's exactly why i still wear my fitbit. i initially bought it just to track my sleep patterns, but now i wear it every day and make a conscious effort to walk more than i would otherwise because "the fitbit is watching me".

related plug: i made a fitbit low battery notification tool with their api and twilio. it will pull your battery info every hour and send you a text message and/or e-mail when your battery gets low. http://fitbit.jcs.org

I'm still waiting for the day that we can see a realtime graph of our nutrition profile, from serum vitamin D to insulin (and blood sugar) to testosterone. Imagine watching a protein counter tick up in realtime as your chicken breast is digesting.

We'd be able to engineer instant gratification for eating healthy.

Somebody needs to build a site that aggregates data from all of these devices - this could be a real dashboard for your body and would be incredibly useful. Imagine giving your doctor a guest login for your dashboard...

http://developer.runkeeper.com/healthgraph/introducing-the-h...

Thanks for the link. I've been thinking there was a gap in the market for this kind of service for a while now. I wonder if there's scope to add some psychological indicators to the API, so as to integrate with Mappiness (http://mappiness.org.uk) or similar?

The problem is that most people don't really like to see negative feedback/reinforcement. When they see they're not fit, or not getting enough sleep compared to others, they'll get discouraged. Any data is useful, but it's not very motivating. Also, having used apps like Nike+, most of them aren't very accurate at all

The accuracy will improve over time, but the real challenge for all of these health tools is that they accomplish a job most people aren't trying to do.

A lot of people say they care about or would be curious to follow things like their weight, BP, or heart rate, but very few people actually do. The barriers aren't even very high--taking your morning, resting heart rate or stepping on a scale is dead easy, it's just not very valuable information to most of us.

Heck, what most people who have hypertension, pre-diabetes, or obesity really want is for the disease to just go away. Since a quick pill or surgery for many of these problems don't exist, not thinking about the condition is the next best thing.

These health tools are getting a ton of press lately and I have no doubt that they'll be very useful for doctors and the committed few, but the real problem to be solved is motivating people to care about their health like they care about their bank accounts.

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