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Are Monitoring Devices Turning Your Health Into a Game?

by Amar Toor on March 12, 2010 at 04:23 PM

Your mini pedometer will tell you how many steps you've taken today. Your BodyMedia Fit will keep close tabs on your heart rate. And the Zeo sleep system can let you know just how well you're really sleeping. Everywhere you look, there seems to be another gadget that can keep track of one of your vital signs. But has this mass mechanization of our anatomy turned us into glorified Tamagotchis? Wired executive editor Thomas Goetz seems to think so. According to Goetz, many of these devices have transformed personal health and hygiene into one giant game. Not only do personal monitors instantly collect and archive individual data, they've also turned self-monitoring into "something fun, something that we can play with and improve upon."

Intuitively, this makes a lot of sense. By streamlining something as infinitely complicated as the human body, and reducing it to absolute lowest common denominators, these kinds of tools can demystify health for many, and make it seem simple. The whole Tamagotchi metaphor that Goetz attempts to paint seems a bit watery, though. Sure, you're walking around with some sort of handheld device, and yeah, you may be pushing some buttons here and there. But at the end of the day, it's still up to the individual to take some sort of measurable action that goes beyond buttons and beeps. We may have incorporated the same, underlying system of incentives into our own personal health, and monitoring devices may force us to consider health as more of a game than we did before. But ultimate agency still rests with us, and the only way to "win" (or delay losing) is through real action.

Besides, health has always been a game -- it's just that the latest generation of monitoring devices makes us more aware of that. But it hasn't exactly made us conceive the human body as one giant in and out box, in the way we once treated Tamagotchis. In strictly objective terms, it may be "better" to adopt a more rote behavior when it comes to personal maintenance -- and these kinds of devices certainly move us further in that direction. But no matter how much we try to turn health into a game, there are probably too many influences, external or otherwise, that will persist in convincing many of us to "cheat." [From: Wired]

Tags: health, monitoring, science, tamagotchi, top, web

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