I was recently reviewing a video by the very impressive Kelly McGonigal (author of the Willpower Instinct – interview video here) as a part of, what appears to be, a new series called “Open Office Hours” and posted to the Stanford University Facebook account.  At 1:26 in the video, she explains that when you are confronted with a piece of research (specifically in this instance related to health) that it’s important to test it for yourself and then makes the statement “believe your own data.”

That is a very powerful statement to make!

Awareness of the opportunities to impact one’s own health and then the wherewithal to actually make a change also necessitates awareness as to the impact that that change is having on you.  And to do that, conveniently, we have  useful tools available to us to help begin tracking and reporting on that data ourselves…but how?

Enter #mHealth

One of the trends that has certainly begun to make its mark on the issue of monitoring and tracking this data is the mobile health (mHealth) industry.  From apps to the actual hardware itself – in the case of the iPhone 5s and its motion sensing capability, but even as early as the simple GPS function being used in running and biking apps – many people are starting to log and catalog this data for themselves.  The difficulty is that sharing this information is usually specific to a particular platform, creating a barrier to actually leveraging the social side of health behavior modification, which we know to be so important at creating success (read pretty much anything I’ve previously written in the Health inSite series).

An early leader

WebMD is leading the way with an in-app storefront for purchasing interoperable medical devices that already work with the 2net platform (Qualcomm’s health cloud services) and will make it easier to stay on top of health and health behavior.  Further, with the avado partnership and connection between Medscape and WebMD, the app should be able to handle end-to-end management of those health behaviors beginning with: identification of information related to a certain health metric or behavior; access to the acquisition of a relevant piece of equipment to “sense” the data related to the health factor; wirelessly transmitting and logging relevant data; and then through co-ownership between the patient and the provider, the ability to monitor that data and make adjustments.  Throw in a little bit of personal social network for those wanting to connect this with their existing support (or in the “friends’ friends make you fat” way, lack of support) to help create the conversation necessary to actually affect our health behavior and our health self-concept.

Dr. McGonigal is right

While it is exciting that we are starting to be able to monitor and track all this cool stuff about ourselves (some have been doing it for decades in larger and smaller ways even before the tech was available to integrate the monitoring with the data management), the important thing is that you have to test it for yourself.  We don’t all respond the same way to every intervention method, and some things work better for others that won’t even begin to help us.  But we cannot know how or what will work until we make the decision that we want to try and then start tracking that data and, most importantly, recognize that we need to believe in (trust) our own data to help us make the decisions that will have the greatest impact in whatever we want to improve while creating our optimally-performing self. This is the art of health based on the science of health.

To our health,

Ryan Lucas
Manager, Engagement & Development