Institute For The Future

Making Health Take Less Work

 

Is that bagel a good choice given your genetic makeup? Are your hobbies maximizing your mental fitness? Are certain friends making it hard for you to control your weight? By the way, are you getting sick of thinking about the health implications of pretty much everything you do?

 

At the Quantified Self blog, Gary Wolf posted an outstanding Powerpoint presentation by Rajiv Metha and Hugh Dubberly that makes an important point that highlights some of the challenges of these new interventions. As they put it: "People care about life... and cope with health."

 

In other words, what we do to manage our health--from remembering to take a pill in the morning to going to the gym at lunch to skipping a late night snack--is work. And oftentimes, Metha and Dubberly suggest, breakdowns in health interventions breakdown because they feel as clinical and impersonal as they sound.

 

So what does this mean for neuro, genetic, network and other new interventions? Metha and Dubberly argue that in developing new health products, services or interventions, developers should ask themselves, among other things, if "your system [is] alleviating or increasing the user's workload." I think this is an important principle--and a good starting point for designing to improve health.

 

That said, I'm not sure I fully understand one of their conclusions. In effect, they argue that people should be able to "design their own wellbeing" and otherwise set their own goals for health and wellbeing. And in some sense, this seems self-contradictory. While setting goals and being self-directed about health sounds great in theory, the challenge is that just the process of defining these goals--not achieving the goals, but defining them--takes a fair amount of work that people may or may not want to put in.

 

Sure, there are plenty of people who would like to have a greater say in the day-to-day impacts of their health, and giving them better tools to do so, and greater recognition in the medical community, will be critical. But equally critical over the next decade will be recognizing that for many people, an ideal amount of health management would involve, effectively, no work, thought or management at all and that reaching them--whether with the newest biomedical technology or a decades' old pill--will involve making healthy choices as simple, and require as little effort, as possible.