Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [46]
Or what if you could see in plain-as-day graphical form that 80 percent of the time when you order a red-meat entree at a restaurant, you become on average 30 percent less productive at work and half as likely to go to the gym the day after? Armed with such knowledge, you might cut back on red meat or redouble your vigilance against lame rationalizations for not exercising.
Or what if your e-memory gave you a chart showing a connection between moderate exercise and improved sleep? That will be more effective than generic advice or nagging to motivate you to get out and walk more because your own (digitized) experience will be telling you this.
In July 2008, a year after my second bypass, I felt some slight angina pains while walking to work in the mornings. This could mean that my arteries were getting clogged again, which would be extremely bad news. So I decided to log my weight, diet, exercise, and heart rate to see if I could glean any patterns. Would eating a dip or two of ice cream have repercussions? Were the tingles in my chest related to times or distance that I walked?
I carried a small GPS tracker on my way to work, measuring the distance walked and elevations encountered—remember, I live in San Francisco. I wore a Polar heart monitor and pedometer for a record of my heart rate and footsteps. The monitor makes suggestions for my weekly workouts based on height, activity level, and my weight. With GPS and a pedometer, it can download workouts from the Internet and keep track of all my exercise.
I used my BodyBugg to look up how many calories I’d burned in the past two days, or since breakfast, or in the past ninety minutes. I compared my average burn rates on weekends versus work-days. In the evenings I checked whether I’d burned more calories than I’d consumed that day, which I could use to justify a little ice cream.
I even made a point of wearing my SenseCam during meals to see if it could give me pictorial reminders of the food I ate, as opposed to what I remembered eating. How many shrimp did I really consume? What was on that snack table in the coffee room?
I learned that the angina was related to my food intake. By increasing my exercise and reducing fat even more, I was pain-free again after six weeks. Ice cream and even low-fat cheese are verboten, just as I had given up butter and foie gras in ’83 after my first bypass. I am becoming convinced that one can eliminate plaque with a regimen of diet and exercise, just as physicians like Dean Ornish claim. If only there were a way to easily measure that buildup.
The benefits of health lifelogging are irresistible: increased self-reflection and self-knowledge, less room for denial or half-conscious fudging on your diet-tracking or time spent at the gym, improving your health habits, helping you cope with or cut down on stress by identifying its causes, alerting you when you get swept away by negative passions, and saving your life by identifying incipient strokes, heart attacks, panic attacks, and other acute episodes.
ENTER THE PROACTIVE ADVISOR
Farther down this road, we will see the advent of the e-Nurse. Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University has developed a virtual health coach called Laura. Laura is a computer-generated character who nods and raises her eyebrows as she engages in conversations with patients.
Laura has increased the physical activity of elderly patients by 100 percent, and is used to help schizophrenics stick to their medications. While e-Nurses can never be as good as real nurses in many ways, it turns out that patients are sometimes more comfortable asking questions of a virtual health provider, rather than taking up the time or asking potentially embarrassing questions of a real person. Besides communicating with patients using an animated character, e-Nursing can take place via text messaging, cell phones, chat sessions, or any electronically mediated form of communication.
With all this in mind, you should expect to hear stories like these soon:
Sara gets an e-mail from her family