Use health monitors to better understand your body and respond to changing environments.
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Editor’s note: Today, more and more health monitors continue to receive data about our bodies, such as heart rate, weight, blood sugar, etc. Through these data, we seem to have a brand new sensory organ This allows us not only to better understand the body, to understand the changes that cannot be felt inside the body, but also to better adjust our body from these data and to deal with more uncertain threats. This article was translated from the article titled “Health Trackers Are Enhancing Our Senses” in Medium.
Today, our data on all aspects of our body is more and more transparent than ever, thanks to the digital sensors embedded in our smartphones, watches and scales.
Now, we can closely monitor and evaluate many aspects of our body through these devices and get a lot of information about our physical and health assessments. Without these devices, we can’t get this information through perception or intuition.
Before the appearance of personal health monitors, few of us recorded persistent changes in body weight or blood glucose levels. Now, anyone can use a device to monitor changes in their weight or blood sugar levels every day or even after each meal. More than half of Americans now use the latest monitoring technology to record their health every day.
We are just beginning to focus on using these devices to document the long-term effects of our physical health. However, the most noteworthy finding is not about how people deal with this data, but how it affects people. Researchers have found that people do not support continuous monitoring of their physical health and can change a person’s behavior. On the contrary, people gradually realize that continuous monitoring of physical health has a powerful psychological effect and can raise people’s awareness of their own bodies.
A study earlier this year found that people get a specific perception of their body from the ongoing monitoring of health, which encourages them to better control themselves and help them better manage Your own health problems. The author of the study, New South WalesDeborah Lupton, a professor at the University of New South Wales, wrote: “People’s sensory abilities have been enhanced and expanded, because with this technology, people have more to their bodies. Understanding.”
“The data seems to be another new sense that helps us perceive our body.”
Some people even reported that they used this monitor to have a more wonderful perception of their body. Initially, they may use health monitors to better understand heart rate variability, blood pressure levels, and other potential physical processes, just to observe the level of the data. But as time goes on, as they become more familiar with the parameters of these devices and the indicators, they can more accurately perceive the changes in their bodies.
For example, a woman has the ability to predict the ovulation cycle through a health monitor. The sociologist Whitney Boesel recalls that she was a patient at a fertility clinic and she wanted to get pregnant, so she started using the home ovulation monitor regularly. Over time, she began to realize that her predicted ovulation period was more accurate than the ovulation period she had at the clinic.
Social scientists Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus explain in their book Self-Tracking: “These data have become ‘ The new sensory organs’ help us to feel our body.” In the process of monitoring, it is not only the result of observing the monitoring, but also the feeling of the physical signals emitted by the body. Combining data and physical signals, and performing regular analysis, can transform the underlying processes within the body into processes that people can perceive as physical changes.
“For some health monitor users, the number in the monitor is not the meaning of health monitoring at all,” said Tamal Sharon (Tamar, a professor of philosophy at Radboud University). Sharon) agreed. “On the contrary, they are more like an intermediate stage of transition from simple perception to richer perception.”
The “feeling” we get from these devices not only improves our physical condition, but also enhances our perception of the outside world.
The German Udo Wachter wears a special belt with a directional sensor attached to the digital compass. When the belt is turned, the north facing belt It will start to vibrate. By using a strip belt, Wacht cultivated a very sharp sense of direction.
With only a week’s belt, he can feel where the “north” is. Six weeks later, he was against the cityThe location and location of the place have an instinctive feeling. “My mind seems to have been loaded into a city map,” Wacht said. “No matter where I am, I can always find my way home. Even if I am in a completely strange place, I feel that I will not get lost.”
Despite this, people are still worried about the increasing reliance on privacy issues caused by these devices. Because the data based on these devices can predict people’s behavior, especially considering that the data may be sold to third-party companies such as insurance companies, employers and credit card companies. Other studies have found that many people place their natural intuition on the health monitor completely. This raises the question: If a person’s understanding of his health is based on the wrong data, then what? Do?
There is a man in his fifties who is Paul, who uses a heart rate monitor to determine if he is in a state of tension. When he enters a state of tension, the monitor emits a red light and an alarm, and he doubts its reliability. “When I first used it, it started to flash a red light, but I didn’t feel nervous at the time,” he reported. So when he continued to use the monitor, he began to use these readings as an objective indicator of his stress level, rather than the only indicator of whether he was in a state of tension. Without clinical trials, people may not be able to confirm whether their health monitor readings are related to the health they want to monitor. Users may have difficulty interpreting the data themselves.
Having said that, Kevin Kelly, editor-in-chief of Wired, believes that in this era of over-consumption, technology has improved our perception and may be in more ways. Play an important role.
He wrote in The Inevitable: “Now, in a technologically advanced world, too many consumer goods threaten our health, too many choices make us Metabolic and psychological imbalances… Our bodies are not able to record these new imbalances well. We have not evolved to the point where we can sense blood pressure or blood sugar levels, but our technology can do it.”
Health monitors and other wearable devices can give us important information about our health and the environment, and if we can make the most of it, this information may help us improve our health and adapt to the environment. .
Translator: Xiaozhuo