BPM
When I’m in the gym, I pay the other users about as much attention as I’d be comfortable receiving. Which is not to say there are no exhibitionists there, but most of us are focused solely on our own sweaty attempts at entropy deceleration. But if I do stray from the blinkers of unspoken gym etiquette and glance around at the users of the cardio equipment, I’ll often notice that people cover up the LED information display panels with sweat towels.
What’s the cause of the data anxiety? That others may look past their public physical presence and judge them based on the blinkenlights? Or, more likely, that they’re intimidated by the numbers themselves.
I understand why the information can have that effect. Things like time, distance, even kcal burned, that’s all fine. The one that’s always a little scary is heart rate (which gets displayed by the machines with electrodes in the handles, or picked up from transmitter units). I’ve always just mentally filtered it out. I’ve never felt the need to know about my heart rate. It’s icky scary of-the-body stuff. Until I looked it up recently I wouldn’t have know what a normal, resting, heart rate would be. I’ve somehow never even taken my own pulse.
This bugged me for a while. I decided I wanted to develop some kind of familiarity with my heart rate. The idea was, I’d buy a heart rate monitor and try to cultivate a checking reflex – not just during exercise, but any time. Like how you might occasionally check the time, or an unread message count.
So I broke my personal rule about not buying new tech that wasn’t a replacement for something else (it’s not replacing a watch – I haven’t owned one since my Pop Swatch popped off over a decade ago). I poured over the specs of various products and eventually got into the tech buying trap of attempting rationalise paying more for features I previously didn’t care about (GPS, computer-downloads, etc).
Eventually I decided it hold off, for now, on anything too sophisticated and went for a Polar FS3c. And maybe I was a little swayed in my choice by the fact that it’s one of the heart rate monitors sported by Edward Norton in the 2008 movie The Incredible Hulk.
The Incredible Hulk was one of my favourite movies of last year. Mainly because, by focusing on the fugitive story that drove the 70s TV series, it positioned itself as a geek Bourne Identity. Instead of a trained assassin, Banner is a renegade scientist able to somehow evade a Special Forces snatch-squad (even before his involuntary green ríastrad, a transformation only triggered after local bullies mess with his PC).
A fairly close embodiment of hacker nomad of net-lore. Have encrypted laptop and network radio equipment will travel. He can jury-rig a centrifuge in the favela for grinder-style self experimentation whenever needed. While the Hulk represents the fear of our bodies betraying us, Banner becomes someone taking steps to overcome that fear. (Like the movie hard-men able to perform surgery on themselves.)
It even has a little fun with the current conventions of the genre. Bruce empties the contents of Betty’s handbag on to a motel bed: “Basically we can’t use any of this because they can track all of it.” “My lipgloss – can they track that?”
If there’s any complaint I have about the movie it was that there was too much Hulk. I do appreciate the artistry of CGI monsters hitting each other, but the final half hour takes it a little too far. Apparently sci-fi movie budgets are such that multi-million dollar recreations of the alley-fight from They Live now seem like a good idea.
There’s no word of a sequel yet, but the tying of Hulk into the Captain America origin-story, along with the Tony Stark cameo, firmly establishes it as part of Marvel’s Avengers remscéla – perhaps as hero, perhaps villain.
The heart-rate monitor itself is used cleverly in the movie. It takes the role of a sinister countdown clock. The beeping of the watch heralding the potential for disaster. And while the watch performs as it would in reality, the movie does lie a little.
We see Norton bare-chested (a clear requirement for the role) on several occasions when using the heart-rate monitor. I assumed that the elecrodes were embedded into the strap, but a little research shows that the Polar devices use a chest strap – something I assume has been finessed away from the movie’s world for aesthetic reasons, even though strapless HRMs actually exist.
2002’s Panic Room is another movie that uses medical monitoring in this way. A diabetic’s watch shows their current blood glucose level – it’s suggested that below a certain point and hypoglycaemia kicks in. The watch is a movie fiction – we just have to assume there are wires in the body, either connected to the watch, or relayed from a sensor elsewhere.
The current, real life, version of this continuous blood glucose monitoring is something like the Dexcom system in which a cool little cyborg wart is stuck to your body and is relayed to a hideous tamagotchi-looking receiver unit (that would have looked odd even back when people still carried pagers).
I think I’ve assumed that there was some good reason that personal medical tech always had to look a little out of date, but the iPhone 3.0 preview last Tuesday showed a preview of a iPhone fingerstick (rather than continuous) glucose monitoring application.
So what happens when the device that records your medical status is also the device you use to update your social connections?
I can see some crossover with the grinder and personal infomatics (“Quantified Self”) crowd who aren’t afflicted with the specific aliments these technologies are aimed at. Just adopt the tech as cyborg gadgets providing yet another datapoint – especially for non-invasive measurement techniques.
I’m a member of a generation that’s seen the culture of internet personal sharing and disclosure occur only after our own youthful embarrassments were already behind us. Financial and medical information is private – that much is sacrosanct. Which is why I wouldn’t be surprised to see that attitude challenged over the next decade.
Imagine some ambient representation of your friends list which incorporates this information – marrying the medical telemetry of the USCMC in Aliens with the wearable contact list of clatter
It might be a represented by subtle changes in shape, and colour. Or maybe just like the changing face of BJ Blazkowicz. You might learn to tailor any real-time communication to your recipients present physical state.
It doesn’t seem too far fetched. My girlfriend allows me access to her Nike+ data (in an interesting connection, it was Edward Norton’s voice on the commercials). I’m not a runner myself, so it doesn’t ever represent useful actionable information. Yet the access itself has some meaning, some value that I don’t yet have the tools to describe.
Of course I’m still mentally entrenched in the world of risks and nightmare scenarios. You might not want to keep discretionary medical records that can be subject to discovery by insurance claims investigators. Or, in the UK, the many tentacles of the RIPA-enabled state (the current message to banks and benefit claimants alike seems to be: if you ask for support, you consent to surveillance). Maybe stories of spouses demanding an explanation for jump in heart rate for a partner supposedly working late at the office, or the panic of parents when equipment glitches produce aberrant results.
I’m cautious and conservative when it comes to this sort of thing. It can take years for the technologies, especially those encourage new forms of sharing, to find their way through the following mental sluice gates:
- How is this any different or better than X?
- Why do you care?
- Why do you think anyone else would care?
- What are the potential health/privacy/lock-in risks?
- What are the network benefits?
- Do the benefits outweigh the potential health/privacy/lock-in risks?
- Why is my preferred username already taken?
Whenever I hear about someone preserving a moment of chemical idiocy to a social website it’s usually followed by “that’ll come back to haunt them when they run for political office and discover they’ve inadvertently licensed the indiscretions of their youth to a media conglomerate”. But part of me wonders if there’s really that much value in the idea that we need to maintain some kind of plausible deniability about our lives – in the unlikely event we run for political office (…in an future where only paragons are electable).
Indeed, I recently watched an episode of The West Wing on DVD that seemed to suggests that, for high profile politicians, at best the position of well-guarded privacy will result in culture shock when your entire life is suddenly thrown open to the scrutiny by your enemies, and at worst your secrets become the things other use to influence you.
So maybe, when the issue arises, we should just relax.
Current heart rate: 69 bpm.
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