Institute For The Future

Self-Tracking for Activity... and Investing?

Consumer electronics company Phillips has recently released a couple new products that integrate self-tracking and biofeedback into the design in order to optimize the user's behavior. One device, DirectLife, is focused on helping people become more active and the other, more surprisingly, is designed to help people make "rational" investments.

 

Fast Company reviews DirectLife. Kate Rockman, who wrote the review, and plans to write updates over the next few months, notes a couple instances where tracking her activities has already encouraged her to be more physically active:

 

I'm told to act natural during the assessment period, but it's hard not to want to take one more lap round the water cooler knowing that each and every step is being tallied...

 

In other words, even the idea of measuring something makes her want to improve it. Later in her test, she adds that:

 

When I get home at 10 p.m., I want nothing more than to climb onto the sofa and zone out for an hour, but before I climb the two flights to my apartment, I balance the DirectLife against my palm and get my reading for the day so far: only two measly green dots light up. Begrudgingly, I call my fiancée down to the sidewalk and we snake our way around the neighborhood. An hour later, I've earned all six dots (booyah) and my foul mood over being goaded to exercise by a hunk of plastic has lifted. I actually feel, well, pretty good.

 

In the rest of her piece, Rockman notes that her major fitness goal is to make activity a more regular part of her life. And for this sort of purpose, it sounds like DirectLife is well-designed. It's pretty easy, in the course of a work day, to lose sight of making time to leave one's desk and move around. In other words, this is the sort of tool that can help a person turn exercise from a prescribed occasion and place--a workout in a gym--to a part of everyday life.

 

But while DirectLife sounds promising, based on press reports, I'm a bit more skeptical of their second device: The Rationalizer. Written up in CNBC, the device works like this:

 

The "Rationalizer" consists of an "EmoBracelet" that measures the "arousal component of the user’s emotion through a galvanic skin response sensor," and an "EmoBowl."

The higher the trader's arousal level, the more intense the lights on the bracelet and bowl become. When they get really worked up, the color shifts all the way from a yellow to a deep, warning red.

 

It's actually a much more innovative use of self-tracking and biological data than improving activity levels, and in some sense, an early signal of non-health devices that use biological information to help the user guide and make decisions. It's not hard to imagine these sorts of technologies improving food choices, for example, or being integrated into products like cars to help people modulate angry or sleepy driving.

 

But investing? As the CNBC piece notes, "Experts are divided on whether emotions play a good or bad role in trading." In other words, I'm a lot more bullish on tools for self-tracking impacting areas other than personal finance and investing.