Institute For The Future

First Round Research: From Self-Experiments to Life-Doulas

* DISCIPLINES/TOPIC:

 

Quantification and Self-Experimentation (benefits, disruptions) - From Self-Experiments to Life-Doulas

 

 

* HOW DOES IT ADDRESS “TRANSFORMING BODIES AND LIFESTYLES”

 

Self-Experimentation affects individuals, peer groups, employers, and countries. It falls most neatly into the buckets of "Diets, eating, and metabolism" and "Surroundings, movement, and exercise".

 

The "input" is data about your life and the changes you make to it, "processing" is analytics that help uncover trends in the data, and "output" is what you do in response to that data. For example, if you take a new supplement and want to see how it affects your mood, you input your mood, process the trend of your mood against other variables for the time period of the experiment, and decide (output) whether or not to continue taking the supplement based on the result.

 

 

* EXPERTS: (Max 6)

 

Gary Wolf, Quantified Self and Wired

Seth Roberts, self-experimentation, UC Berkeley

Gordon Bell, Microsoft, Total Recall author

Thomas Goetz, Wired and Decision Tree author

 

 

* EARLY WORKING HYPOTHESIS

 

Increasingly passive monitoring of diet, sleep, mood, exercise, biomarkers, and other body systems will lead to intelligent systems for implementing optimal lifestyles.

 

Today:

 

FitBit, Nike+, and iPhone apps of all kinds have become household names. Amateur athletes track their runs. New parents track their baby's sleep and diapers (TrixieTracker). Dieters track their calories (DailyBurn). Sleep can automatically be tracked with myZeo. People are collecting more and more data on themselves but don't know what to do with it yet, other than look at the graphs and motivate themselves to keep going.

 

In 10 years:

 

Living with a chronic illness will become much easier due to automation of diet tracking, non-invasive blood marker monitoring, and the ubiquitous presence of home monitors. National programs to facilitate tracking will result in decreased health costs as people take more active roles in their health. Collections of n=1 experiments and self-organized clinical trials will be an agile, de facto replacement to conventional clinical studies. Preventive and resilient interventions will be suggested at the point of weakness - don't eat that muffin unless you run a mile today, otherwise your health insurance premiums will go up! Interactive data visualizations will be commonplace, complete with interpretation and a recommendation engine to change your health routine, incorporating your genomic and epigenomic data in its decision support. Doctor visits will dramatically decrease.

 

Monitoring systems will serve as doulas, guiding us discreetly, making life smoother, easier, and healthier with little effort on our part.

 

Sciences/technologies involved:

(self-organized clinical trials, n=1 experiments, smart phone apps, portable devices including accelerometers, ubiquitous non-invasive biomarker monitors/sensors, GPS, genomics/proteomics/metabolomics, participatory research, bioinformatics, collective/interactive data visualization and sense-making)