Institute For The Future

The Future of Mobile Health is Disconnected

Like an increasingly large number of people, I avoid computer, phones, and just about any other form of interaction with technology-based media when I'm on vacation. Think of it as a media diet to combat information overload and ensure a sense of well-being. And this isn't just an idiosyncratic choice--it turns out that an increasing body of research is showing that all of our information sources are making us unhealthy.

 

Writing in Miller-McCune, Sara Barbour highlights some of the research that is increasingly linking an over-reliance on cellphones and other necessities of everyday life to some troubling health outcomes.

 

[O]ur open embrace of the cellphone is not without irritation and critique. More than 86 percent of cell users are annoyed when a peer interrupts a conversation to check their phone or answer a call, and almost half find it annoying to be interrupted themselves by a call or text.

 

Nor are the consequences of constant communication limited to irritation: Research from the Sleep Disorders Center at JFK Medical Center in Edison, N.J., found correlations between the use of phones after bedtime and attention-deficit disorders, mood swings, anxiety and depression. But with the rise of devices the likes of the iPhone and Droid, it has become increasingly harder for kids — and adults — to unplug at night. Cellphones are no longer just for mere communication — they are cameras, computers and entertainment consoles wrapped into one....

 

 

This echoes something I heard while conducting some ethnographic interviews for our research into the future of well-being. A number of people I've spoken with highlighted some specific media avoidance practice--avoiding newscasts, ignoring phone calls, disconnecting and avoiding the onslaught of information--as critical to creating a sense of well-being in their daily lives.

 

And this makes sense, in light of the astonishing amount of information we're increasingly tasked with making sense of. I've seen a few different versions of this statistic, but the ballpark version is that we create as much data in a couple days as existed in the entire world in 2003--with data generation expected to double every 1.2 years. Put differently, if you feel overwhelmed now trying to keep up with new information--from your work email to personal health and finance advice--imagine what the challenge will look like in a decade when we have an exponentially larger set of information to try to make sense of.

 

It's easy to imagine that increasing numbers of people will need tools and strategies to keep from feeling overwhelmed.

 

One such tool has to do with filtering out things that might be challenging, disturbing or otherwise troublesome. Examining these tools is the premise of Eli Pariser's new book The Filter Bubble, which I've been reading about--and reading--which examines the ways in which the push to personalize information consumption is making it increasingly hard to understand the viewpoints of other people. In a deliciously ironic twist, my interest in the book has resulted in ads for the Filter Bubble following me everywhere I go online. It's like the world knows I'm interested in personalized information filters and is tempting me to buy it through a highly filtered information scheme.

 

In any case, Pariser's argument is that as we have increasingly personalized filters on information, we'll have fewer tools to grasp information and ideas that challenge our preconceptions, and instead will simply get information that reenforces whatever we already believe. In the context of health, it's easy to see where personalized information could be counterproductive--diet advice that avoids nutritional research, drug advice that skips over side effects. Basically, any domain where we have to make daily health decisions in our daily lives that impact our long-term sense health.

 

In other words, I think these two concepts point to an emerging personal tension many of us will be increasingly facing: The need to simultaneously manage understanding increasingly absurd amounts of information in order to take advantage of our best understandings of the world, and a simultaneous need to avoid overexposure to information to simply maintain a basic level of sanity.

 

Which brings me back to the idea that the future of mobile health is disconnected. Put differently, the past decade has seen a ton of effort put into thinking about how to turn our mobile devices into tools to give us little reminders and bursts of information to try to encourage us to engage in this or that behavior, by personalizing recommendations to our daily habits. It seems to me that the next decade's mobile health strategies may very well focus on the opposite strategy. Instead of pinging us with reminders about what to eat and when to exercise, they'll simply shut themselves off for a while and force us to interact with some unfiltered part of the big, physical world.