Denver’s Chris Dancy claims to be surrounded by 700 sensors, including the ones on his body, in his house, and on his dogs. It’s possible that he’s overdoing it, and it must take him forever to get through airport security, but he’s clearly an interesting poster child for the Quantified Self movement.
The Daily Mail, not the world’s most restrained publication, has a long take on Dancy, who carefully tracks pretty much everything he does using Google Calendar. This alone make Dancy useful and points up an important place where the wearables business needs improvement: interoperability and data management. If Google Calendar is your data analysis platform, there’s a problem. It’s like using Excel as your word processor: you can do it only if your demands are small and there’s nothing else around.
Dancy appears to make his living as a speaker and consultant to businesses who want to understand the wearables market. As a committed living experiment, he’s a guy to watch, as are lots of people who live in the future. What does he do with all this data? Well, it appears to have driven him toward weight loss and meditation, which is a fine if limited result.
Our takeaways from Dancy:
- It’s possible to monitor every piece of your life.
- It’s hard to associate all the data.
- It’s harder to draw useful conclusions from the data.
- It’s a fascinating experiment, and we’re eager to see how it all plays out.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZOQkp80_BU]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJm2XhUKmAg]
nice job. your observations are really spot on in very hyper personal ways.
Thank you, Chris, and thanks for dropping a line. They’re interesting roads you’re going down; please do stay in touch.