The Future of Health and Fitness.
This article from The Age shows the sorts of things we should be keeping an eye on and highlights the vacuous level of technology writing.
Which of these digital technologies can really be used in training, or in health care? What sort of research do we need in terms of the non-obvious issues – e.g., bypassing traditional sources of expertise, and removing redundancy and opportunities to discuss things from different perspectives. For example, if I am able to monitor my own blood pressure, visual acuity, E coli levels etc, that is all well and good, but do I know how to interpret the information?
What do the individual symptoms tell me? What do the combination of symptoms tell me? Do I need a doctor if I have Google? And who will be responsible for my care if I end up having to do all the monitoring myself?
What is the role of DNA testing in our future – what can we really do with the information? And what happens when we live forever? If you consider the things our research is focused on, we are already bored with our lives – how will this boredom play out if we live forever?!
“Fun Fitness” seems to think that playing electronic games will make people enjoy exercise. They don’t seem to have considered that one of the fun things about electronic games is that you don’t need to get hot and sweaty to do exciting things. You don’t need to go outdoors to play sport. People seem to be able to get away with dumb statements like “Games aid learning and make long term positive behaviour more likely to continue” – where is the evidence for this? What is “long term positive behaviour”? What “learning” has taken place?
And the role of Google Glasses in injury rehab is new to me (Kinect I get, but not sure what Google Glasses will do in this domain).
“The real strength in these quantified self-devices is their ability to make positive behaviour change in an individual,”
Really? Really? Quantification leads to positive behaviour change? Since when?
Perhaps what we should be doing is taking the many many many articles like this as templates for the real articles we should write (ie tackle each of these topics properly) and make a repository of such articles.