Health And Fitness Trackers Are Becoming A Lot More Granular
Many people have become accustomed to devices quantifying their steps or heart rate. That’s just the beginning.
5 min
From counting 10,000 steps to reminding when to stand or take a few deep breaths, many Americans have become accustomed to devices quantifying their progress toward health goals. Is this just the beginning?
Businesses and researchers are dreaming up the next generation of methods to create and quantify personal data, with the aim of using the information to boost health and happiness. Some technologies are in their infancy, including machines that sit in the home, passively scanning for early signs of illness. Others are in limited use. Still others, such as smart thermometers and blood-glucose monitors, are widespread, but their proponents see untapped potential in the data they collect.
These advances bring concerns about security, as sensitive information is beamed up to the cloud, and privacy, especially in cases where manufacturers own data about their customers’ health that the customers themselves can’t access. It’s still too early to know exactly which metrics correspond to improved health, or whether zealously tracking them itself has negative impacts.
Natural Medicine
Research has shown that time outdoors can benefit well-being—but do certain natural settings have an outsize effect? NatureQuant, based in Bend, Ore., is aiming to quantify time in nature. This week, the company released NatureDose, an app that tracks people’s time indoors and outdoors as they go about their daily routines. The app can map the types of nature a person passes, whether a lake or tree-lined city street, through phone sensors including GPS and accelerometers. That data is paired with NatureQuant’s mapping systems to determine a person’s proximity to natural elements. The app is being tested in clinical trials in universities, with the aim of determining how time in nature impacts anxiety and depression. Eventually, the company hopes, health professionals could use the data to prescribe time in nature, even tailoring recommendations by lifestyle, season and locale. For example, the app could alert users with vitamin D deficiencies to the best time to catch UV rays.
Watch Your Mouth
Dentists have long advised brushing teeth for two minutes twice a day. In the future, quantifying dental data, such as tracking acidity in the mouth, may help forecast cavities before they happen and draw connections between oral health and other health issues. For example, night guards or other devices that measure specific biomarkers in saliva could uncover disease, such as inflammation of the gums that is linked to diabetes, says Dr. Corneliu Sima, an assistant professor of oral medicine, infection and immunity at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Camera-enabled toothbrushes could serve as oral scanners, beaming real-time information to dentists, who could use machine learning to sift through the data to determine whether patients need to come in for a visit, he says.
Body of Water
The well-known admonition to drink eight glasses of water a day has persuaded many Americans to lug around water bottles in the hopes of satisfying their hydration needs. Hydration, after all, has been shown to benefit brain function, heart health, digestion and other bodily functions. Is eight glasses really the right number for everybody? In the future, connected devices could help assess how much water is the optimum amount for each individual. The PÜL SmartCap, a mobile-connected water-bottle cap, recently hit the market promising to help consumers set goals and track their hydration levels with an accompanying app.
In the Blood
Some people are wearing blood-glucose monitoring devices, which continuously measure blood sugar via a small device worn on the arm, even if they don’t have diabetes. Elevated or spiking blood sugar is linked to heart disease, stroke and diabetes, so proponents of blood-glucose monitors say that tracking blood sugar could help wearers personalize their diets and live healthier lives. The Levels software, for example, allows users to watch their glucose levels on an app as they eat different foods, exercise and sleep. Ultimately, the company envisions people having several biosensor streams to help them optimize cell function and predict disease, says Dr. Casey Means, the chief medical officer of Levels.
The Wearable You Don’t Need to Wear
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a wall-mounted, laptop-size box that sits in the home, analyzing electromagnetic waves around residents as a noninvasive way of gauging health metrics. Using machine learning, the device can track breathing, heart rate, movement, gait, time in bed and the length and quality of sleep—even through walls. Health organizations, hospitals and medical schools are using the device. It is being used in clinical studies for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s and immune diseases and was used to monitor Covid-19 patients in isolation during the first wave of the pandemic. Dr. Dina Katabi, a professor at MIT’s computer science and artificial intelligence lab who led the project, says the boxes could be used in the homes of seniors and others to help detect early signs of serious medical conditions, and as an alternative to wearables.
Taking the Temperature
Thermometers are ubiquitous in households across the country. They are often the first medical tool that people consult once they start feeling sick. Aggregating those temperature readings and associated symptoms could someday quantify and diagnose illness at a population level. In the coming years, smart thermometers may be able to help determine whether patients have particular strains of flu or Covid-19, based on symptoms, temperature and other data collected in the area. Inder Singh, the founder of Kinsa, a San Francisco-based smart-thermometer company, says this kind of diagnosis could allow patients to bypass doctor visits and get medication quickly. Kinsa is working to turn its smart thermometers, introduced in 2013, into a system that detects outbreaks and tells people how and when they should seek treatment. The network has about 2.5 million thermometers in the U.S. so far.
Old Dog, New Tricks
Pet owners, including the many who adopted animals during the pandemic, are seeking to quantify the health of their furry friends as well. Whistle Fit, for example, offers a glimpse into a possible future for connected pet care. The 1.5-inch device affixes to a dog’s or cat’s collar and monitors its health, fitness and behaviour. Sensors collect data about a pet’s daily routine. Algorithms analyze the data to detect behavior tied to well-being, including playing, running, sleeping, exercising and drinking. After establishing a baseline, Whistle can determine whether a pet’s behaviour is changing. The owner can set exercise goals based on breed, age and weight. The company provides summaries to share with vets and alerts around behavioural problems like excessive licking or scratching.
The Right Amount of ZZZs
A plethora of products is already on the market to help people sleep. More futuristic offerings include robots that help lull patients to sleep with breathing exercises and “digital sleeping pills,” beamed through headbands that play music or soothing sounds when they sense users are about to wake up, says Dr. Seema Khosla, the medical director at the North Dakota Center for Sleep. Going forward, it would be helpful to have a bespoke assessment of how much sleep each individual needs, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all recommendation of eight hours, she says. Devices will likely be less clunky in the coming years, she says, sitting by the bedside with less need for physical contact with the sleeper.
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: 13th, January, 2022.
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Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
Terrible commutes. Expensive child care. Employees explain why they will keep working from home.
4 min
What’s still keeping American workers out of the office?
At a time when restaurants, planes and concert arenas are packed to the rafters, office buildings remain half full. Thinly populated cubicles and hallways are straining downtown economies and, bosses say, fragmenting corporate cultures as workers lose a sense of engagement.
Yet workers say high costs, caregiving duties, long commutes and days still scheduled full of Zooms are keeping them at home at least part of the time, along with a lingering sense that they’re able to do their jobs competently from anywhere. More than a dozen workers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal say they can’t envision returning to a five-day office routine, even if they’re missing career development or winding up on the company layoff list.
Managers say they will renew the push to get employees back into offices later this year. The share of companies planning to keep office attendance voluntary, rather than mandatory, is dropping, according to a survey released in May of more than 200 corporate real-estate executives conducted by property-services firm CBRE, one of the largest managers of U.S. office space.
A battle of wills could be ahead. The gap between what employees and bosses want remains wide, with bosses expecting in-person collaboration and workers loath to forgo flexibility, according to monthly surveys of worker sentiment maintained by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who studies remote work.
Escalating expenses
One reason workers say they’re reluctant to return is money. Some who have lost remote-work privileges said they are spending hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of dollars each month on meals, commutes and child care.
One supercommuter who treks to her Manhattan job from her home in Philadelphia negotiated a two-day-a-week limit to her New York office time this year. Otherwise, she said she could easily spend $10,000 a year on Amtrak tickets if she commuted five days a week.
Christos Berger, a 25-year-old mortgage-loan assistant who lives outside Washington, D.C., estimates she spends $2,100 on child care and $450 on gas monthly now that she is working up to three days a week in the office.
Berger and her husband juggled parenting duties when they were fully remote. The cost of office life has her contemplating a big ask: clearance to work from home full time.
“Companies are pushing you to be available at night, be available on weekends,” she said, adding that she feels employers aren’t taking into account parents’ need for family time.
Rachel Cottam, a 31-year-old head of content for a tech company, works full time from her home near Salt Lake City, making the occasional out-of-town trip to headquarters. She used to be a high-school teacher, spending weekdays in the classroom. Back then, she and her husband spent $100 a week on child care and $70 a week on gas. Now they save that money. She even let her car insurance company know she no longer commutes and they knocked $5 a month off the bill.
Friends who have been recalled to offices tell Cottam about the added cost of coffee, lunch and beauty supplies. They also talk about the emotional cost they feel from losing work flexibility.
“For them, it feels like this great ‘future of work’ they’ve been gifted is suddenly ripped away,” she said.
Parent trade-offs
If pandemic-era flexible schedules go away, a huge number of parents will drop out of the workforce, workers say.
When Meghan Skornia, a 36-year-old urban planner and married mother of an 18-month-old son, was looking for a new job last year, she weeded out job openings with strict in-office policies. Were she given such mandates, she said, she would consider becoming an independent consultant.
The firm in Portland, Ore., where Skornia now works requests one day a week in the office, but doesn’t dictate which day. The arrangement lets her spend time with her son and juggle her job duties, she said. “If I were in the office five days a week, I wouldn’t really ever see my son, except for weekends.”
Emotional labor
For some, coming into the office means donning a mask to fit in.
Kenneth Thomas, 42, said he left his investment-firm job in the summer of 2021 when the company insisted that workers return to the office full time. Thomas, who describes himself as a 6-foot-2 Black man, said managing how he was perceived—not slipping into slang or inadvertently appearing threatening through body language—made the office workday exhausting. He said that other professionals of colour have told him they feel similarly isolated at work.
“When I was working from home, it freed up so much of my mental bandwidth,” he said. His current job, treasurer of a green-energy company, allows him to work remotely two or three days a week.
Lost productivity
The longer the commute, the less likely workers are to return to offices.
Ryan Koch, a Berkeley, Calif., resident, went to his San Francisco office two days a week as required late last year, but then he let his attendance slide, because commuting to an office felt pointless. “I’m doing the same video calls that I can be doing at home,” he said.
Koch, who works in sales, said his nonattendance wasn’t noted so long as his numbers were good. When Koch and other colleagues were unable to meet sales quotas in recent weeks, they were laid off. Ignoring the in-office requirement probably didn’t help, he said, adding he hopes to land a new hybrid role where he goes in one or two days.
Jess Goodwin, a 36-year-old media-marketing professional, turned down an offer to go from freelance to full time earlier this year because the role required office time and no change in pay.
Goodwin said a manager “made it really clear that this is what they’re mandating right now and it could change in the future to ‘you have to be back in five days a week.’”
Goodwin, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., calculated that subway commutes to Midtown Manhattan would consume more than 150 hours annually, in addition to time spent getting ready for work.
Goodwin’s holding out for a better offer. She said she would consider a hybrid position if it came with a generous package and good commute, adding: “And I would also probably need something in my contract being like, ‘We’re not going to increase the number of days you have to come in.’”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
