WEARABLE TECH
Tracking Our Bodies
Fashion Technologist
Last year, I attended my first Quantified Self meetup in Los Angeles. I was vaguely familiar with the movement — whose motto, “Self Knowledge Through Numbers,” naturally converged with my interests in big data, biosensing, and wearable technology. I had recently leaped onto the self-tracking bandwagon, logging everything from how many glasses of water I drank to how many steps I took a day.
Thanks to the recent explosion of devices such as the Nike FuelBand, Jawbone Up, and Fitbit, the ability to ubiquitously track everything from our heart rates and activity levels to sleeping patterns is becoming remarkably simple. For self-improvement, there are apps to help you track your water intake, productivity, mood swings, and fertility. There’s even a digital fork, the HAPIfork, that will monitor how fast you eat. These apps and devices are the latest fitness and self-help craze that promise to help transform you to a thinner, more efficient, and sufficiently-hydrated you through daily monitoring, tracking, feedback, and social encouragement or competition.
Julie West
As expected, the presentations at the QS meetup were chock-full of detailed spreadsheets and charts, revealing a resounding fetish for numbers. Curiously, as much painstaking attention was given to gathering and mapping the data, the data was also openly acknowledged as often being inaccurate or “too noisy.” My FuelBand and Fitbit data never agree — although I never expected them to, as I wear one on my wrist and the other on my waist. If the accuracy of the data is really not that important, then what — or more importantly why — are we tracking, exactly?
Self-tracking, it turns out, much like yoga, is a “practice.” It’s a practice of self-observation that leads to self-awareness and ideally some form of behavioral change or self-improvement. The apps and devices aspire to be more motivational than accurate and use social motivation as a carrot for reaching your goals.
My phone pings me when it’s 3 p.m. and I’ve only had three glasses of water. It also winks at me and lets me know that my friend Paige is well on her way to having hydrated, supple skin. Just wearing the FuelBand is a visual reminder of the commitment I made to myself — and it does irk me when my stats are below the average in my demographic, even when I know that the reason for my recent drop is that I kept forgetting to charge the device.
With the development of new, sophisticated biosensors, these new technologies will soon reach beyond motivating us to get off the couch and will offer us a true sense of empowerment and feeling of control over own health and body. Soon we will have instantaneous access to real-time measurements of various biomarkers including stress hormones or cardiovascular disease. Our garments will remind us to breathe when we get stressed and let us know that we’re at high risk of muscle cramps because our potassium levels are dangerously low.
If this data can be translated into meaningful feedback and actions, we’ll have new sets of tools for “listening” to our minds and bodies in our everyday lives in hopes of perhaps discovering something new about ourselves. What we see now is just the beginning. 
Syuzi Pakhchyan is a fashion technologist and author of the first DIY book on interactive fashion, Fashioning Technology (fashioningtech.com).
