Technology collects data about us with nearly every action but how much of that data is available for analysis to give us visibility over how we are living our lives. Information is abstracted away and returned to us in the form of targeted marketing, this is the number one way our data is used and is the lucrative business model employed by Google and Facebook. How can data work for you?
Starting 2021 I decided that I would like to know more information about how my fitness, health and sleep, i’ve previously had forays into food intake tracking via MyFitnessPall and an original Fitbit flex. Both of which required intervention to collect eating and sleep data. Both of these systems failed to work long term as repetitive tasks become unsustainable without a specific goal to hit. Just wanting an overview on life with no added input is the aim here.
I began to research ways to collect life data passively which required no input,, Fitbit has become synonymous with fitness trackers and that’s in part how it’s found it’s place amongst the tech behemoths like Apple. Back five years ago you had to trigger an event for it to track your sleep, which didn’t really work as sometimes we don’t make the conscious effort to know when we’re about to sleep. In the latest models sleep tracking with the added accurancy and insight of heart rate tracking.
I went for the Fitbit Charge 4, which for less than £100 came with a wide array of features, including automated activity tracking for a range of activities incluing walking, cycling and sleeping, all of which I wanted to track passively combined with the heart rate monitoring.
The device has around a seven days battery life and doesn’t cause drain on my phone, so for the effort of charging the device once a week it meets the requirement of passively collecting data with no user input.
The device does a good job at collecting data, including: Heart Rate, Steps, Activities, Resting Heart Rate, VO2, Sleep Patterns, Deep, Light and REM, Oxygen Variation (for sleep apnoea), and Time Asleep. All with no user input.
The device does a good job at collecting data, including: Heart Rate, Steps, Activities, Resting Heart Rate, VO2, Sleep Patterns, Deep, Light and REM, Restlessness, Oxygen Variation (for sleep apnoea), and Time Asleep. All with no user input.
The majority of the data is consistent enough for it to highlight changes or subtle improvements and it does provide motivation and awareness about keeping active. It does have one technological limitation in that automatic activity detection, i.e. cycling rather than walking, doesn’t kick in until fifteen minutes of cycling has been done. This impacts data collection because my cycle to work is only ten minutes and therefore doesn’t track accurately without activating GPS, or cycling a longer route to work.
The app sends me a report each week that provides guidance on how activity I was in relation to the previous week. An important part of using the data is that it needs contextualising into information before being finally being applied as knowledge. (thanks Data for Humans). The accuracy of the data being collected is not medical grade, but it is accurate enough to provide awareness of changes and for personal data that can be used to provide valuable insight into my life with no user input.
The device also tells the time, provides smartphone notifications, contactless payments using Fitbit pay (which doesn’t fully support UK banks). Having always grown up with digital watches, with my daily driver at eleven years old was a Casio watch with a thermometer and world time. The Charge 4 is minimal, unobtrusive and most importantly works consistently at collecting passive activity data. Available at Amazon UK and Fitbit.
I bought this the week before Google completed it’s purchase of Fitbit, Google have been charged by the EU not to use the health data for advertising for at least ten years, with the possibility of this being extended. This does offer some protection but doesn’t meet the criteria of digital autonomy. As with all mobile devices one major obsticle for open source systems is battery life, batteries are solely made efficient for proprietary systems. There are systems for flashing Pebble watches with opensource software, although as a part of the passive activity tracking it had to be consistent with no user input.
There are also no current means for silo’ing personal information, it is all stored in deep web databases and there is no transparency on who access this information. When it comes to data there can only be security in transparency; knowing exactly what is stored, where and who has access, then you know your data is secure. Why do people allow Facebook to own the links between there social interactions? Google own links between businesses and consumers, we accept this because they offer an efficient and relatively fair system of distributing the internet. Although there old mission statement of Don’t Be Evil, says a lot about the company. If google search changed to be subtly authoritarian no one would know and they could inflict great harm to societies that use their search results. The other two superpowers certainly have their own search engines with Yandex and Baidu.
Once part why democracy is currently fading is because the distribution of information doesn’t follow an open framework, democracy cannot be secured until their is security in transparency. For only in the shadows can the darkness thrive.
n’t
