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For Christmas this year, my mom bought my whole family the Fitbit Force. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Fitbit tracks your daily “steps, distance, calories burned, stairs, active minutes,” and even sleep! The hope is that wearing this device will motivate people to be more active by quantifying their daily movements. So far, it seems to work and has even inspired some late night dance parties to help reach the daily 10,000 step goal. This device is just one example of how technology is advancing our health awareness.
The “quantified self movement,” “life logging,” and “personalized medicine” are pretty common buzzwords these days. Smartphone apps and miniature computer devices like the Fitbit allow people to track, in detail, many aspects of their lives. Counting steps or calories are examples of how you can quantify your life. The act of keeping track of these numbers on a daily basis is known as life logging. Personalized medicine is a bit more tricky to describe. I recently stumbled across an ethics paper that sought to definitively define personalized medicine: “Personalized medicine seeks to improve stratification and timing of health care by utilizing biological information and biomarkers on the level of molecular disease pathways, genetics, proteomics as well as metabolomics.” In other words, by sequencing your genome, or identifying and quantifying all of the compounds in your blood (e.g.) you can more accurately diagnose and treat health issues.
To illustrate how keeping track of your daily habits can benefit your health, I turn to the work of Dr. Larry Smarr. My mom recently saw him speak at the Atlantic Meets the Pacific. You can watch his 2012 lecture here or read an article about him in the Atlantic. In addition to physical activity, Dr. Smarr monitors his heart rate and sleep, gets his blood tested regularly, has had his genome sequenced, and also sequences his gut microbes. With this information, he was not only able to lose weight, but he also discovered that he had an inflammatory bowel disease before he showed physical symptoms. The idea is that the more we know about our bodies’ biochemistry, the more quickly we will be able to identify potential illnesses and therefore seek treatment faster. Who knows, some day there may even be toilets that give you a read out of your gut microbial population every time you flush!
You may think that obtaining your genetic information, for example identifying your gut microbes, is a far-fetched idea. However, there are services available to the public that either sequence your microbes’ or your own genome. I recently participated in the American Gut Project, which for $99 you can have your body part of choice sequenced (skin, gut, mouth, etc). This study aims to collect data on how diet and lifestyle affect our microbial friends. uBiome is a start-up seeking to inform the public of their microbiomes ($89/kit). If you’re only curious about your own genome, you should look into 23andme. However, the FDA has currently banned the company from making health recommendations based on individual’s genetic data, but they may change their policies in the future.
Current medicinal practices focus on treating illnesses after they become symptomatic. But what if you could prevent the problem from happening in the first place? By quantifying your daily habits, you become in tune with your body and its needs. This information is invaluable for goals such as losing weight, but it also equips you with more knowledge to share with a healthcare professional should an illness arise. Everyone has unique health requirements, and therefore it is time for everyone to start paying attention.
Citations:
Schleidgen S. et al. 2013. What is personalized medicine: sharpening a vague term based on a systematic literature review. BMC Med Ethics 14: 55
