In his novel Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart depicts a near future in which everyone is glued to portable digital devices called "äppäräts". More than mere mobile phones, these track your health, your personality rankings and what percentage of your lifespan has elapsed. And far from being privileged information, these most personal of details are public knowledge in what is now a fully networked society – indeed, your stats are the first thing anyone will check before they decide to sleep with you. All of which makes life rather cruel for our desperate hero, Lenny Abramov ("47% lifespan elapsed … Ailments: high cholesterol, depression"). Lenny may be a salesman in Indefinite Life Extension, but he is failing to make the grade.
Like any well-observed piece of futurism, this picture is both ludicrously far-fetched and just around the corner. For the first generation of these holistic lifestyle monitors is now upon us. The latest is called UP, and it's a device that you wear around your wrist – day and night. It measures your activity levels and your sleep patterns, and you can also use it to monitor your eating habits. All of this data is stored in an app on your iPhone or iPod Touch, and naturally it is there to be shared with friends or colleagues. Together with your "team", you can pursue your collective goals, whether it's losing those extra pounds, running that extra mile or sleeping that extra hour. UP's marketing positions it somewhere between a "fun" consumer product and the answer to a societal epidemic of obesity and declining sleep quality.
Produced by Jawbone, the makers of hands-free headsets and the impressive Jambox portable speaker, UP uses an accelerometer, or motion sensor, that counts the number of steps you take in a day and is sensitive enough to detect whether you are in a light or a deep sleep. Of course, pedometers have existed for years, as have sleep monitors, but UP brings them together in one neat, socially networked package.
The logic is that a healthy lifestyle is not just something we adhere to on our once-, twice- or (in my case) zero-weekly trips to the gym – it's a way of life. So Jawbone, working with product designer Yves Behar, has housed its delicate machinery in a rubber wristband designed to be comfortable and unobtrusive enough to wear all the time. It is, then, step one towards Shteyngart's "äppärät".
But as gadgets go, UP is decidedly ungadget-like. You could easily mistake it for one of those rubber charity wristbands that were all the rage circa 2008. It is not a piece of conspicuous tech, but plug it into the headphone socket of your iPhone and it will tell you that you've walked 8,258 steps today after having slept six hours and 52 minutes (of which 3:03 was deep sleep and 3:49 light sleep). That is, if you were me.
I was awe-struck seeing my first night's sleep dissected into slivers of deepness and lightness. That bar chart seemed full of profound insights into my wellbeing. I was even showing my friends – after all, if someone asks you why you're wearing a "man bracelet", what better riposte than to call up a graph of your sleep rhythms? Here was data that I couldn't even have guessed at – because I was unconscious. In the daytime, we have a sense of whether we've been active or not, but even then there was a morbid fascination in knowing exactly how many steps I was taking. At first, anyway. After a few days, this information became utterly banal. The digital age is very good at feeding back data but, without interpretation, numbers are just numbers. 8,258 steps over 3.94 miles? Wow – but so what?
The problem here was one of goals – my lack of them. UP – as in "up and at 'em" – is unashamedly goal-oriented, aimed at people who want to improve their fitness or their sleep quality, not someone coasting along in the belief that he's fine, thank you. And it won't tell you whether you need more sleep, or more deep sleep, or how to achieve either of those. You have to set the goals yourself and do whatever research you may need to in order to get the data moving towards your target.
Similarly, it won't tell you anything about what you're eating – it's up to you to log your meals and analyse them yourself. Still, whatever these limitations, a lot of people will find this a valuable tool and will seamlessly integrate it into their lives. For me, the chief asset was in being woken up by a vibration at my wrist at the end of a deep sleep cycle (it will wait, you see, instead of catching you in the middle of a deep sleep, which would leave you lethargic) rather than by my alarm clock. Apart from that, as someone who hasn't worn a watch for years, I kept involuntarily looking at my wrist and not finding the time there.
However, UP's social media dimension is full of prurient potential. It takes Nike's "social running" programme, with its inherently competitive aspect, a step further. Now we can share and compete over our activeness, our sleep quality or the healthiness of our meals. Pizza and beer for dinner will elicit OMGs and frowny faces from our "team". Biological data is the new frontier of social media. In the next-generation model we'll all be sharing our bowel movements – LOL. In the model after that we'll be sharing our adrenal-stress index and our sperm counts. What starts as helpful lifestyle monitoring develops into new forms of social unacceptability. Today it's your smoking, tomorrow it's your cholesterol.
But it's not as though we didn't know this was coming. Having conquered mobile telephony and portable music, we still have the endless steppes of healthcare to colonise with our digital consumer products. While UP may not yet be Genghis, it is clearly the first iteration of a product-type that will keep evolving until it's of serious use to Lenny's Indefinite Life Extension firm. And, of course, it wonderfully fulfils the historically circular logic of the consumer product, a logic that runs something like this: gadgets begin by saving us labour and giving us more leisure time; then, to fill that leisure time, we invent gadgets to entertain ourselves; soon we're glued to gadgets in our work life and in our social life so that we're no longer moving enough or sleeping enough. What's the answer? A gadget – what else?
