Starving Dietitian

The Revolution is Health Advised

The revolution isn’t coming, it’s already here. People don’t generally look at health as an area ripe for technological revolution. How wrong they are.

Technology has already shaped the way we view nearly every aspect of our lives. From work to entertainment, even dating has been overhauled by the internet. The next step is pairing biology with technology.

The field of medicine is already seeing the rewards of such integration. Like this video of ECG sensors talking to a Doctors iPhone anywhere in the hospital.

All of that is massively intriguing, but not much use on a personal level. That my friends, is happening now.

We’re entering an era defined by lifestyle tracking. Don’t believe me? Take a look at emerging services like Strava that use your phones GPS mapping to log miles, time, and heart rate during exercise and compare them to others online.strava

That is where we are headed.

If you haven’t been following the market, Fitbit already has a handful of wearable activity monitors that track steps taken and movement during sleep and log it online. ces010813000007-4_3_r536_c534

They even sell a scale that uses wifi to track weights in the same service! It is rumored that Apple Inc. themselves are prepping an iWatch with built in activity monitoring. Once they get their feet wet it’s sure to catch on. 

Imagine getting home, wirelessly syncing your Fitbit with your phone and seeing “STEPS BELOW GOAL”. What does that mean? Grab your running shoes and go put in your 30 minutes, tracked in Strava of course.

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There are near endless possibilities for tracking.  Add a heart rate monitor and see how stressful your day was, or body temperature sensor to see your peak metabolism for the day.

I heard a doctor recently compare a handful of these emerging products and said he asks all of his patients to get one. Much like glucose tracking for Diabetic patients, the doctor simply plugs in the device and sees months of past efforts in one pass. 

The time of lies and excuses is coming to an end. The time of truth and tracking is here. I can’t wait.

Start logging those miles.

Be good to your future self.

-J. Iufer

2 comments

  1. The video is from 2009, as he stated “the last two years we’ve learned more about chronic disease than the rest of the history of human kind combined”….and that was 3 years ago.

  2. Pingback: Calorie Con | The Starving Dietitian

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