Quantified Self- Charlie Betts

I do not have any apps that I have personally downloaded on my phone that track my activity, but I do have the health app activated on my iPhone. This app tracks the amount of steps I’ve taken in a day, my walking and running distance each day, and the amount of flights I have climbed in a day. It presents this information in a line graph, and you have the option to look at each category in terms of day, week, month, or year. There are many other things that the app can measure but it requires you to put information about yourself into the app. The app automatically tracks how far I’ve walked/ran. I do not check the app every day, but I will check it every once in a while.

There are several different categories that the app has for you to input information about yourself in, like body measurements, your age, what you’ve eaten, etc. I am sure that if you input all of this information, the app will provide a more accurate representation of your health.

I see this app being very beneficial in the future, only if people adapt to it and use it all the time. Like I said, if you input all of your information and track yourself every day, the app could potentially provide a realistic representation of your health information. This information could be very beneficial to doctors and researchers, who can use it to help their patients and track trends in people’s health habits.

Neither I nor the app post anything to social media about the data it collects. I do not feel it is necessary to share that with people.

I do not like self tracking, I think it is pretty pointless. When I look at the health app on my phone, I do not feel any strong emotions when I see the information. Sometimes I’ll laugh if I have had a day when I do not take very many steps, or, if there is a day where I had taken a lot of steps I’ll think back to what I did that day. Generally when other people post about their quantified self on social media I’ll ignore it, unless they are posting for an important reason. For example, if one of my friends is trying to lose weight and they post about it, I’m okay with that. But I have some friends on social media who love to lift weights and take pictures and videos of themselves doing so, with captions that depict how much weight they are lifting. These types of posts are annoying and pointless to me, as I feel like they are just showing off.