From time to time I like to run, um, guest columns from some of GNV’s best and brightest (or maybe just its funniest, quirkiest and profoundiest). Anyway, this is from Robert Hutchinson, aka Hutch, aka GNV’s own Big Lebowski. Enjoy.
I’ve observed with detached amusement as friends breathlessly report on their accomplishments with the statistics generated by health apps on their watch or phone.
I’m almost always an early adopter of technology and use it all day, so I’m not a techno-Luddite. I even know a couple of people who, within a week of getting a smart-watch, realized they had health issues serious enough to warrant urgent medical intervention.
And I have witnessed the use of Artificial Intelligence in the medical setting enough to be both amazed and appalled at how it’s being deployed.
So why don’t I get one of those watches, or even glance at the health app on my phone?
My own family history suggests the arc I can expect as the pearly gates crest the hill. So I am setting myself up now, like Julieanne Moore did in “Still Alice”, for the statistically probable slide into dementia.
As I learn about ways to exercise the brain muscle to keep it strong, flexible, and healthy, I realize I have inadvertently been designing the app that would convince me to acquire a health-monitoring, cajoling, nagging, and despairing digital wrist-bot.
For the health issues I care about, it would:
* Tell me how many minutes of person-to-person conversations I had today, including what percentage of it included eye-to-eye contact, and the ratio of listening to talking that I did.
* Monitor the sights and sounds around me, and let me know how diverse my experience was today in terms of the environments I was in. As a bonus, it would count how many species of birds and insects I had heard that day. It might even refer to a map that awards high scores for time spent in healthy places, and low scores for mind-numbing places.
* Let me know it I had paid attention to my Circadian rhythm, and relaxed when it would do the maximum good in recharging my gray matter.
* Listen to the conversations around me, and give me a vocabulary score on how complex the language is. A bonus feature would be a score for how empathetic, or creative, or funny the dialog was. Why not add a minutes-of-laughing vs. frowning meter, too.
* Observe how much time I played with a pet or pursued a hobby. If I’m making music, it would let me know how each song I’m playing has changed. If I’m shooting pool, it would let me know how my bank shot is improving (if it ever does).
* Every time I look at the phone during the day, it would first make me do a short-term memory quiz, or solve an executive function problem before unlocking.
* Time spent looking at spreadsheets, or numbers in general, would count against my daily score.
* It would warn me with frownies after too many minutes spent doom-scrolling, and emit foul odors after a pre-set limit.
Anyway, you get the idea, and perhaps have a few apps that you would add to the Hutch Watch™.
The Dude abides on Facebook. Check him out.
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