Obsessed with Monitoring Self

Telugu translation using Google Translator here

I saw this news item “Smart Earring Monitors Body Temperature” in my mail box from ACM and the first thing that stuck me is when was the last time I measured my body temperature. It was a very long time ago may be during COVID when the doctor advised me to keep track of the body temperature, SPO2 among other things and assume it an emergency if the temperature was consistently high for some period of time (may be it was two days!). That was the only time I recall monitoring my body temperature with some continuity. Else it was only when one had fever and the local physician would shake a thermometer and plop it under your tongue and then wait for a couple of seconds and read the temperature on the hard to read mercury scale and pronounce 101.2 (you know it was high even if he did not mention the unit of measurement!). Any high temperature meant no school, wet towel on the forehead and a sympathetic cuddle from your mother and your favorite food which, unfortunately, did not taste good and a suitable dose of an antibiotic or a Pracetamol. Two days after you were back to your feet and the need for thermometer did not come until your next bout of sickness.

So the article did generate my curiosity and I was on the GeekWire news article. The article speaks about how the temperature is measured, talks about fashion picking on the omnipresent “smart watches” as not being fashionable enough, how the battery powered earring can last for 28 days without recharge and then goes on to explain their next move … to introduce … a necklace that can continuously monitor heart rate! Clearly they have done sufficient research and have cover good ground. Almost every possible dimension of launching a series of products around their idea!

Everything, except the crucial point, namely, “why does one need to continuously monitor ones temperature”.

I don't find fault with the “researcher” or the “business(wo)man” who came up with this grand vision of a product that can measure the temperature; it definitely makes for a “catchy” news item and may be helps publish a paper (oh yes, an article appeared in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies!) and who knows this could span into a jewelry line of products – a startup may be. There are a whole lot of things that can happen.

But the basic question is why do we need continuous sensing and more importantly (the title of the blog!) why are we so obsessed with continuous monitoring of our physiological parameters?

Physiological parameters {example blood pressure, body temperature, breathing rate, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation etc} are useful reference values which capture the functioning of a human body. However most of these parameters deviate all the time depending not only on the environmental condition like the time of the day, the season, but also on the emotional condition of the person like when one is feeling anxious, feeling happy, or watching a horror movie on Netflix. Needless to say the physiological parameters of a person are almost always varying, 24x7, through out the day. Additionally and more importantly these parameters are, in several cases, person dependent as well. Meaning though they deviate from the “reference” they are “normal” for that person. Just imagine the degree of anxiety, if you the continuously monitoring device kept beeping to “warn” you about the deviation (false alarm); even a normal person would find herself little tensed leading to phantom health issues.

I believe our body is a wonderful machine. It has the ability to look at all the functional systems (Respiratory, Nervous, Endocrine, Muscular, Skeletal, Urinary, Reproductive, Lymphatic, Excretory, Endocrine, Sensory) not only individually but also as a one complete complex integrated system and communicate when something is not right with your overall system in the form of a signal which asks you to slow down. It is another thing that we as humans have not learnt to interpret the signal. We continue to do what we do without interpreting the subtle signal.

May be it is time for us, as humans, to aspire to become smart (we claim we are, but are we really?) and not so much depend on smartX (X= watch, ring, earring).