Know thyself—the new mantra for lifeloggers

Wearable tech devices now track every move you make — from heart rate and footsteps to calories burnt. Even the number of times you slouch in the office chair is recorded by a sensor. An always-on society is busy converting life into bytes of data     British TV show 'Black Mirror' is about a dystopian future, one that illustrates the dark side of technology and where it can take us if we don't watch out. One of the episodes is set in an alternate reality in which an implanted grain records everything you do, hear, see or experience — creating the ultimate life log.      And we are well on our way there. A life log — or a daily diary — is nothing new but technology has taken the idea and sucked all approximation out of it. It has made it exact: life as a pie chart or a bar graph. How many steps did you walk today? How much time did you spend in transit this month? Did you play enough sport this week? What was your heart rate at 9 am today? What was your temperature? All these questions are being answered by numerous devices strapped on various body parts — from bio-sensing t-shirts and posturecorrecting straps to heart rate monitors and pulse-measuring watches. Taking lifelogging to a new extreme are tiny cameras that automatically take a photo of your existence every few seconds of the day.      "So, do you remember what you were doing this day last year?" asks Vishal Gondal, entrepreneur and angel investor who swears by his devices. "I do because I check in everywhere I go. I can just go to Facebook to see what I was doing. I have over 2,000 food photographs. I can tell you exactly where I was, who I was with, what I ate, how long it took me to get there and every detail of the rest of my day."      Gondal uses a water bottle that gives him a daily target of water intake, a Lumoback that reminds him to sit up straight every time he slouches, a Basis B1 watch that is a wristbased health tracker and a Fitbit Flex that measures his sleep and activity. He is eagerly awaiting Scanadu Scout that can measure all body vitals just by resting on the forehead.      The fascination with what has been described as "turning warm flesh into cold arithmetic" is now a movement — the quantified self movement . 'Numbers don't lie' is the primary motto behind self-quantification. And nothing is more satisfying to a number geek than a pattern. As most converts say — what cannot be measured cannot be managed. And much of self quantification's goal is self improvement. Asfaq Tapia, 30, who works in digital advertising in Mumbai, wanted to lose weight and sleep better. His Fitbit Flex helped him lose 6 kg in five months and change his sleep habits. "I like measurable results. My job involves numbers. I know how many people visit a website also, but I don't know anything about my body. That is the first thing I should be tracking." Tapia is also a member of the self-quantification group in Mumbai that now has 100 plus members.      Kuldeep Dhankar, 34, employed with a telecom company, has been tracking his life since 2005, much before self-quantification became a way of life. He converted his father, an ex-navy man, also. "I gave him this watch that measures heart rates and sends all information to the phone via Bluetooth," says Dhankar.      Gondal also converted his father to a heart rate monitoring watch after his recent surgery. "His resting heart rate went up to 100. When I took all the data to the doctor he was surprised that I could do this. Dad's HR went up in afternoons and evenings. So, they tried a different medicine which worked well," says Gondal.      Most of these self quantification devices veer towards health and lifestyle improvement. Some journaling apps do help users track their daily schedules — time spent with family, at work, in transit, in the park, on the phone — but most are geared towards health analytics. "There was a time when these would be only in the hands of doctors but increasingly these technologies will be in the hands of the consumer. By monitoring groups across geographies on their behavior we will be able to not only prevent but also to predict disease," says Prof Ramesh Raskar, MIT Media Lab, who believes that Fitbit-like devices are only the beginning. Gondal hopes that soon insurance companies also start linking such health measurements toinsurance premiums.      However, relentless quantification can be tiring. Skeptics say that such servility to gadgets erodes the spontaneity to life. Farzana Dudhwala, a 24-year-old PhD student at Oxford University who is studying the relationship between self-quantifying technologies and the self, says that she was bored of Fitbit in two months.      "The device was good to understand where I stood (baseline) compared to what the device said wasgood for me (10,000 steps). So, for instance, if I went for a long walk and didn't take the device with me, I saw that I would get demotivated from the walk and I didn't want that," says Dudhwala.      Self quantification converts understand this danger only too well. Dhankar uses a Withings smart body analyzer (like a weighing machine) that plots a weight curve on how things are progressing. The graph has helped him change his weekend pattern because he noticed that his sedentary weekends pushed up his weight on Mondays and Tuesdays. "But I treat all this data as background info. I am not always looking at it. And that is the self-quantification challenge. You have to see past the numbers," says Dhankar.      Dudhwala is tackling one of the most important aspects of selfquantification — about what it does to the 'self' and whether technology constructs our idea of ourselves and our wellness. "For examples, the Fitbit says that I 'should' take 10,000 steps a day. If you take 11K, do you think you have improved further? It only looks like numbers but it is a sort of self-knowledge through numbers. But I would argue that numbers are just a tool."      So, what could diligent, meticulous logging of every waking and sleeping second lead to? Converts say it could be any sort of life change that you need but cannot see. Gondal says life logs will also mean something to future generations. "Cave paintings were life logging for cave men," he says.