Article
Lisa

The quality of Quantified Self

It is inevitable that technology plays a big role in our daily life. Nowadays, we even start to give names to thermostats. For example Anna, Anna is a smart thermostat, which analyzes the lifestyle of residents and adapts herself completely to their lifestyle to make home comfortable (1). She even takes the weather outside into account and makes sure that will enter a warm home on a cold winter day. But thermostats that adjust themselves on our lifestyle aren’t so bad. But it will be bad when we will start to adjust ourselves to the technology. Is that the case with Quantified Self?

 

Quantified Self
Technology telling you how you feel today. That is the new concept, quantified self. The exact definition: Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person's daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical) (2). A whole new market has developed around the quantified self: bracelets that measure blood pressure, your sleep cycle and steps per day. Many good things can be done with the data of these products. For example people start to live healthier and the data can be used in hospitals and clinics. With this system, we will feel more self-responsible for our own health.

But also a lot of bad things can arise of this new technology. Think about insurance companies that can adjust their costs on someone’s personal lifestyle. The risk lays in the inequality of people in this system. It will be a hard task for disabled people to participate in this system. It will cause a gap between fit people and unfit people.

But actually I know a lot people that have such a bracelet. The app that belongs to the bracelet recommends 10000 steps each day. I often have seen that these people will make an extra evening walk to get these 10000 steps. And I think this is a positive side of the device. Because they have the knowledge, people will do more effort to stay fit.

 For an environment where we have to take care of the old ones and healthcare is more expensive then ever, it’s good for our generation to learn to be responsible for your own health. It’s an architectural innovation; a new market and a new product. Therefore it needs good laws of data use to prevent data-abuse. To prevent that people will adjust themselves too much to the technology, they have to remember that it is a helping system, not an obligatory system. The
n, in my opinion, we will have a lot of advantages of Quantified Self.

 

 

Sources:

  1. Information about smart thermostat Anna, source: http://tweakers.net/nieuws/98439/plugwise-introduceert-slimme-thermostaat-anna.html
  2. Quantified-self definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_Self
  3. Image Quantified Self made by Lisa Gerards