Richard MacManus - Health Trackers: How Technology is Helping Us Monitor and Improve Our Health

Its strange to thank a disease, but I must say that getting type 1 diabetes in November 2007 was my major inspiration for writing this book. It made me realize how fragile the human body is and how crucial it is to look after it. Becoming a diabetic also makes one realize the importance of a loving family. So Im grateful to my parents Kevin and Judy, and my daughter Rosabelle, for their continued love and support.

I started my technology blog ReadWriteWeb in April 2003 and left it in October 2012 to begin research for this book. In the nine and a half years I spent building ReadWrite (as its now called), I made a great many friends, especially within my own company, whose many writers and other staff over the years inspired and motivated me as a technology journalist. I also met a lot of smart and talented people outside my company, via the international blogosphere, and it still amazes me that anyone can now build a media entity that is read all over the world. For that I thank one of my personal heroes, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, for creating the World Wide Web. I met Sir Tim in 2009, to interview him for ReadWrite. It was one of the proudest moments in my life.

Im very grateful to all of the entrepreneurs and medical professionals I interviewed for this book. Every one of them was very passionate about the potential of technology to improve healthcare. Id also like to thank the organizers of the Health 2.0 Conference, the Personalized Medicine World Conference, and the Quantified Self Silicon Valley Meetup Group.

Last but not least, my heartfelt appreciation goes to all of the forward-thinking doctors in the world, in particular my own doctor, Dr. Tony Crutchley of the Thorndon Medical Centre in Wellington, New Zealand. Dr. Crutchley has been my GP since 2000 and has guided me through the highs and lows of my own health. Although Im a firm believer in the value of technology to help me monitor my health, I will always rely on my doctor for his expertise and humanity. I hope everyone who reads this book feels the same way about their family doctor.

Richard MacManus, October 2014

We can change our behavior and habits (it requires a lot of energy).

Buster Benson, My Beliefs

Change has been a constant in the life of Buster Benson, a 36-year-old Web developer and serial entrepreneur from Seattle. He changes his behavior and habits often, in an ongoing quest to find a mix of daily activities that will make him happy. He regularly experiments with things like what to eat every day, how much quality time he spends with his young family, whats the right number of sit-ups to do (and when to do them), and how much time he spends doing rewarding work. In the name of change, Buster Benson has even gone so far as to change his name. Not once, but twice. A few years ago, Buster Benson was known as Buster McLeod. Before that he was Erik Benson, the name given to him by his parents. Change is what drives Buster Benson, although paradoxically his goal is to find an equilibrium of happiness in his life.

Bensons ongoing life changes have been recorded on the Internet since 1999. Some would say hes an obsessive self-tracker and ask why he puts so much personal data on the Web. But his compulsive need to change signifies an ongoing search for meaning in his life. As for why its on the Internet, thats because technology offers him a way to easily track his personal data and connect it with other people.

The four main reasons to self-track

There are any number of reasons to self-track, but Ive narrowed it down to four main ones. I myself only self-track for the first reason. Id wager that most of you are the same; or perhaps you dont self-track at all right now. As for Buster Benson, he ticks all four boxes.

The first reason to self-track is to monitor and measure your health, to ensure that youre living a healthy lifestyle. This is by far the most common reason. As youll discover in this book, a whole industry has cropped up to enable self-tracking for health purposes: everything from wristband pedometers like the Fitbit Flex and Nike FuelBand, to smart watches like Pebble and Apple Watch, to Internet-connected scales like the Withings scale, to mobile heart-rate monitors, to smartphone apps like MyFitnessPal. We will explore some of these gadgets and appsand find out how effective they actually arein upcoming chapters. In Bensons case, hes currently tracking his fitness with a Fitbit.

The second reason to self-track is to monitor your daily mood. Or to put it more grandly, to track your day-to-day happiness. The search for personal happiness has been a consistent theme in Buster Bensons self-tracking experiments. At one point he developed an online application called the Morale-O-Meter to help him track his moods.

The third reason to self-track is to improve yourself in some way, to become a better person. Dont worry, this isnt a self-help bookthe self-help industry is already overloaded with self-styled gurus who are only too willing to be your guide. But how do you ensure that you stay on the straight and narrow? Self-tracking is one way to do that. For example, Buster Benson wants to be a better husband and father, so he aims to spend a certain amount of quality time each day with his wife and two-year-old son. He tracks his family time every day, in a spreadsheet, to help him be a better Buster.

The fourth reason to self-track is the least common. Its to track your search for the meaning of life. That sounds rather grand, but the fact is that everybody searches for meaning in their life. Sometimes its a spiritual quest, but often its a pragmatic onelike finding a career that is meaningful to you. Whats unusual is to track this process over time, but thats precisely what Buster Benson is doing. Hes posted his life goals to the Internet and even has a publicly accessible online document called My Beliefs. He reflects on his goals and beliefs often, modifying and adding to the files whenever hes learned something new. All these changes are tracked on the Web.

So those are the four main reasons for self-tracking: 1) to track your health; 2) to track your mood; 3) to monitor a self-improvement goal; 4) to help you find meaning in your life. This book will focus mostly on the first goal, tracking for health purposes. Not only is that the most common form of self-tracking, its also having huge ramifications for the healthcare industry. But before we explore health tracking, its worthwhile taking a look at the other three reasons tooif only to see how far you can take the concept of self-tracking. This is where we turn back to Buster Benson.

Benson is an early adopter and more avid about self-tracking than most. However, its important to note that hes not doing anything you or I wouldnt do. Hes not an extreme self-tracker. He hasnt implanted a microchip in his body and he hasnt undertaken to record every living moment of his life online. Hes not after a book deal or his own reality TV show. No, Buster Benson is quite normal underneath it all. Hes a family man who tracks simple things about his life: how many sit-ups he does, how much time he spends with his family, what his career goals are. He isnt even that bothered by numbers, which youd think he would be as a quantified-self fanatic. In fact much of what Benson tracks is recorded using a straightforward true or false question. Today I did ten sit-ups, true or false? Or, today I spent an hour with my son, true or false?

You may not see the need to emulate the amount of tracking that Benson does. Indeed, Id recommend against it, as its a lot of work! But were all interested in monitoring our daily health and wellbeing. We all want to change something about ourselves. Were all looking for meaning and happiness. Perhaps self-tracking can help with one or more of those goals. Buster Benson has experimented enough over the years to at least give us some pointers.