Every few months, I start to feel run down. Tired, grumpy, achey all over. So I open up my drawer and grab one of the handful of fitness trackers I’ve accumulated over the years. I spend a couple of days obsessively tracking my data, looking for clues as to what I do and how I can do it better. I realize I’m going to bed too late, or not sleeping well enough, or that I’ve forgotten to go to the gym for three months. (That one I knew anyway.) And then, at some point, I wake up feeling better and I forget to put on the Fitbit. Back in the drawer, see you in three months.
It’s been a few years since tracking our every action went from nerdy pastime to mainstream hobby. The pitch is so compelling: Just put this thing on your wrist, and suddenly you’ll be privy to a treasure trove of data about how you live your life. And, even better, your device will offer simple, painless, achievable tips for how to improve your life. It’s like a Dr. Oz miracle pill, but with technology! Unlike a Dr. Oz pill, though, this one should actually work. And for many people, including me, it does. My life is measurably (seriously, I could tell you the numbers) better for the Jawbones and Fitbits I’ve worn over the years. But when our devices know where we are and what we’re doing at all times, it’s easy to see how much fitness trackers could be.
Our gadgets have become exceptionally good at collecting data. There’s some debate about the relative accuracy of your Fitbit or phone versus some more scientific methods, but that doesn’t even really matter. I can open up the Health app on iOS and see my walk to the subway each morning, literally step by step. 7:04, two steps. Still 7:04, three more steps. It even knows I went up a flight of stairs! You can collect this data even with just your smartphone, and before long these sensors will be absolutely everywhere. Your watch, your shoes, your shirt, your contacts. “Fitness tracking” won’t be a device—it’ll be a feature, like Wi-Fi or cargo pockets.
And for many people, collecting data is enough to compel them to move more or sleep better. For instance: Russell Foster, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at Oxford, says most people think they sleep worse than they do. For them, simply having an objective measure can be soothing.
“It can put you at ease that the sleep you’re getting is better than you think,” he says, “and that reduction in anxiety can help you sleep better.” Other people respond to the competition, that relentless drive for goofy merit badges and new personal records.
Data alone isn’t enough for most people.
But many users need more. A much-discussed study from the Journal of the American Medical Association found that owning a fitness device and tracking your data was only the first, small step toward living healthier, and by itself was hardly useful. That’s why half of buyers stop using them almost immediately. It’s also why Jawbone, Fitbit, Microsoft, and everyone else are rolling out crazily powerful devices to keep you hooked. All those devices collect more data, but few have found ways to do anything powerful with it.
There’s so much to be done, though. Think about it: our devices know where we are, what we’re doing, the relative state of our body, and much more. What if a device or service could put all of that together, using biological and contextual clues to figure out what I’m doing, and either encourage me to continue, help me improve, or tell me to stop?
Right now, these devices primarily offer high-fives when you hit the arbitrary goal you’ve set for yourself, or a go-get-‘em when you’re close. Then there are the “smart suggestions” and “insights”, which amount to pseudo-scientific platitudes: Go to bed. Turn off the TV. Exercise more. It’s not that they’re bad ideas—Foster ticks off many of them when I ask how people actually can sleep better—it’s just that they’re incredibly obvious and true for basically everyone. These devices subtly remind you to get up off your ass, which I suppose is better than nothing, but it’s not good enough.
‘Go to bed earlier’ doesn’t count as feedback.
The solution isn’t more data, and it’s not even better algorithms. It’s for us to stop thinking about fitness and health as a Big Data problem, and to start figuring out what to do with the sample size of one. Me. And you. (But me first.)
Take Jawbone’s partnership with Nest, which means your thermostat can automatically change the temperature in your bedroom when you go to sleep. Jawbone knows most people like to sleep within a seven-degree window, so it adjusts your thermostat to 67 degrees at bedtime. But I want it to know exactly what temperature works best for me, and to adjust again in the middle of the night when I roll over, accidentally cover myself in forty pillows, and start sweating like a maniac. Then—and this is where it gets really cool—tell me tomorrow morning I shouldn’t sleep next to so many pillows anymore.
SenseFoster sees huge potential in what he hopes will be “a second generation” of these devices. For one thing, they’ll be scientifically validated: he says Jawbone has approached his team about working to ensure the collected data is more accurate, and other companies are doing similar work with other scientists. Plus, Foster says those next devices will be tuned to different age groups and lifestyles. “Smart devices can pick up that you’re using your mobile phone based on the light,” he says, “and can say ‘hang on, you didn’t really stop texting until five minutes before you turned the lights out. You you’ve really got to try and make it more like 30 minutes.’” He says he’d love a sleep sensor that tells him when his mother gets out of bed, so he’d know how she’s doing without calling every day.
Some of those features require more powerful sensors, but there’s already so much more these devices could do. They could use my location to remind me at the subway stop before mine to get off and walk home. They could ping me when I’m near the grocery and say hey, maybe buy some more veggies? They could adapt my sleeping situation in real time, even waking me up if I’m obviously having a bad dream. They could set goals for me, and help me hit them.
Right now, the Apple Watch’s ability to buzz your wrist when you’ve been sitting for an hour is akin to tying a ribbon around your finger and going for a walk whenever you notice it. But either those ribbons need to get far larger, to stand out in the sea of push notifications and buzzes we all train ourselves to dismiss and ignore, or they need to be far more direct and far more personal.
We’re building an impossibly huge library of our self-collected data that developers and manufacturers can tap into. It’s time for them to do more than make broad proclamations about society, or figure out which city goes to sleep the latest. (Brooklyn, represent.) It’s time for them to take my data, and turn it into action.
It’s time for my fitness tracker and my apps to tell me, David Pierce, man of overly caffeinated mind and slightly soft body, how to do better. To tell me something I don’t already know, and then actually hold me to it.