Here at The Foundry a select band of us have been road-testing some mobile healthcare apps in the hope of eating less, exercising more and sleeping better. Oh and generally living the dream of the ‘Quantified Self’
For anyone interested in the gory details you can follow our progress through Twitter - #foundryhealthclub.
It’s still a work in progress, but what’s been interesting, for me anyway is how difficult it is to be absolutely diligent about entering all of the information you need to enter. As is so often the case it’s about the quality of the data - for these apps to do the job they claim to do it’s got to be accurate.
With the exception of the sleep app which requires very little input other than being plugged in and left under a pillow, it’s still quite a hassle looking up calories and fat values and estimating how much butter you’ve put on your toast (thin? thick? can’t see the edges of the bread? - all of these have widely varying calorific values apparently).
And the apps monitoring your movement still rely on your phone being about your person at all times: I’ve given up on the pedometer app after continuously leaving it in my bag – consequently I have absolutely no idea how far off my target of 10,000 steps I am (perhaps this is for the best).
It may be about to get easier however. Tucked in amongst the new features of the new Apple iPhone 5S is the innocuously named M7 chip. This is a ‘motion co-processor’ which claims to track and log your activity more effectively and with significantly less drain on your battery than before.
Well fine, but you’d still need to remember to have your phone with you all the time, right? Well some commentators such as Horace Dediuof Asymco have seen the value of this as being in its next iteration beyond simply being bedded into a phone. In more portable even wearable contexts, one can see its data being seamlessly relayed to your Quantified Self control panel on your laptop, tablet, or yes even phone.
I still struggle to see how it’s going to help me log the calories in ‘some wine’, but I can see myself getting quite excited about the advent of the iHat.
