Wearable devices that track our health may do more harm than good
My girlfriend, "Emily," who likes to hack her health, recently purchased a clever little gadget called the ÅŒura Ring.
The ring transmits more and more data from users to its maker, ÅŒura, which keeps refining its algorithms to make its "Precise, personalized health insights" more accurate.
Ideally, the ring will help you cultivate healthier habits and alert you to problems requiring medical intervention.
"I looked to my ÅŒura Ring data each morning for an affirmation that I was okay. That eventually led to a somewhat unhealthy dependency on the ring and its data. Before you purchase a device like this, you need to ask yourself whether you'll use the data to make better choices, or whether it will cause you unnecessary stress."
Devices such as the ÅŒura Ring are supposed to empower us, by giving us more control over our health, and fitness trackers do apparently nudge some users into exercising more.
A 2019 review in the American Journal of Medicine found "Little benefit of the devices on chronic disease health outcomes. Wearable devices play a role as a facilitator in motivating and accelerating physical activity, but current data do not suggest other consistent health benefits."
"Too often AI and big data are trained on a limited data set and then are used in situations in which the data is not relevant. Solving this problem will require much more training, which dramatically raises the cost and often leads to lower explanatory power." This problem helps explain why artificial intelligence keeps failing to live up to its hype.
The reviewer, Chris, says he hoped the ring would help him "Identify things I've been doing wrong and fix them so I could sleep like a baby and become superhuman." That didn't happen, he acknowledges; after 11 months, neither his sleep nor any other components of his health improved.
Will the ÅŒura Ring and other devices empower consumers by helping them to take charge of their health? I doubt it.
The data we generate with our digital devices help companies make them even more addictive.