Blog 19: Self-tracking in the medical field

The more and more I read Self-Tracking, the more I understand how important some of these devices are going to become in the future. The example brought up in chapter 5 was about health tracking. This seems like a very important area in which to track information about people. Especially people with higher risk for certain diseases. We can also try and become more healthy if we are able to know what is going on in our body. This may also help with taking some burden off of doctors. If you are able to track things such as blood pressure or other vital things about your body, you may be able to get information about what might be wrong from the internet instead of making the trip to the doctor. This might be helpful for non-life threatening conditions that may be discovered. It may also save people money because going to the doctor is not a cheap expense. Being able to understand what some of the numbers mean on these devices will be important as well. I think we are going to need to educate people how to interpret the data they are able to collect from themselves. It is possible because people already do this. For example, people with diabetes keep track of how much insulin they will need to use for each meal that they eat. Knowing how to interpret information that you collect from yourself is going to be very important going forward with self tracking.

Questions:

Are you opposed to being able to track certain things about your body (ie. blood pressure)?

Is it going to be possible to educate everyone of how to interpret their own data and how they should use it?

Picture taken from: http://emberify.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/emberify_qs_medical_health_Cover.png

Neff, G. & Nafus, D. (2016). Self-Tracking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Chapters 5]