Institute For The Future

From Self-Experiments to Life-Doulas in 300 words

 

People are quantifying themselves, running n=1 experiments, and collecting massive amounts of data. Diet, sleep, exercise, mood, biomarker monitoring, genetic sequencing - portable tracking devices and smart phone apps are exploding on the scene with names like FitBit, TrixieTracker, DailyBurn, and myZeo.

How do we collect all this data? Actively engaged enthusiasts rejoice in taking daily measurements. Health-conscious but less techie people are waiting for increasingly passive, non-invasive sensors to become ambient and ubiquitous. A third segment of the population just doesn’t want to know or be bothered at all.

What do we do with the data? Right now, not much, besides creating pretty graphs. But as algorithms become more intelligent, the concept of a life-doula will emerge - a discreet, gentle system that reminds you of your goals in moments of weakness and offers suggestions in context to help you implement your optimal lifestyle. As with birth doulas, life doulas will make life smoother, easier, and healthier with little effort on your part.

 

What are the implications of this? Living with a chronic illness will become much easier due to automation of diet tracking, in-home blood marker monitoring, and real-time genomic/proteomic/metabolomic analysis. National programs to facilitate tracking will result in decreased health costs as people take more active roles in their health. Collections of self-organized clinical trials and participatory research will be an agile, de facto replacement to conventional clinical studies. Interactive data visualizations will be commonplace, complete with interpretation and a social-powered recommendation engine for changes in your daily routine or medication, incorporating bioinformatics as a staple of decision support. Doctor visits will dramatically decrease.

The challenge will be to engage the segment of the population that doesn’t want the doula and just turns it off.