Instrumenting Truman

In the 1998 film, "The Truman Show", Jim Carrey plays an insurance salesman who discovers his entire life is, and has been, a TV show. Everything Truman does takes place under a microscope, viewed by a large TV audience.

Ten-plus years later, we're moving closer to mimicking that movie in real life. Along with the rise in popularity of the smartphone devices comes a rise in an interesting set of web sites and applications that focus on measuring every aspect of your life - your sleeping, eating, exercising, travel, and social activities. Kevin Kelly coined the term, "The Quantified Self" for this interest in self-monitoring. frog's Kristina Loring touched on some of these emerging trends over on the Healthcare blog. This is the first of a four-part series looking at this trend. Part two will look at the gaming aspects of self-measurement, part three will look at the socializing arena, and the fourth part will look at some of the visualization and analysis trends emerging.

Sleep. I have a condition called sleep apnea. Every few minutes while I am sleeping, my throat collapses, and I quit breathing. Luckily, I found a great doctor who introduced me to a CPAP machine, which helps me breathe easier during the night. Recently, several iphone applications (Sleep Cycle, WakeMate, and others) have come out that monitor sleeping habits, giving me more insight into what's really going on during the night. I can even upload my sleep activity from these apps to my doctor, and have a chat over email about any adjustments he wants me to make to my CPAP machine. I still go in for regular visits, and these new apps give us further insight into how my sleep patterns are changing.

Eat. I can track what I choose to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, looking at just the caloric values for various choices, or tracking every detail possible of the foods I'm consuming. The folks over at Livestrong have a nice iPhone app for tracking calories and a lot more. On the Android side of smartphone apps, the folks at fatsecret.com created a solid calorie tracker called Calorie Counter.

Exercise. I can track my activities, and stops along the way (locations, checkins). Both of the apps mentioned above can track my exercise activities, along with my culinary activities. There's also a large set of GPS-based tracking apps that provide real-time tracking of your exercise activities, and calculate caloric burn rates automatically. One of the more popular sets of apps comes from the folks at IMapMyFitness , whose apps are available for both the iphone and android platforms. One of the apps I'm most excited about comes from the folks at Wahoo Fitness. They're working on an adapter for the iphone that communicates with heart-rate monitor, bike sensors, and others, giving me the opportunity to track a lot more of my statistics a lot more closely.

Openness.   I have to wonder where this self-measurement will lead. Given the openness megatrend Tim discussed earlier, I'm bullish on what could be possible.    Adam Bosworth had a new company called Keas that focuses on creating "care plans" based on your data. Many of frog's clients are looking hard at these trends, looking for opportunities to innovate and participate. I get a charge wondering what could happen if we combine this self-monitoring activities, with the emerging EMR/PMR trend, and create an opportunity for an insurance company to encourage subscribers to proactively focus on their health, with guidance from their doctor, and provide their subscribers insurance discounts for performing certain activities, all verified through self-monitoring information? ...and yes, someone will tape their monitoring device to their cat and get credit for exercising, and I have to hope that person will be the minority.

In the next post in this series, I'll turn the lens to the gaming trends emerging in this area, including social support games. In the meantime, please let me know your favorite self quantifying application.