How My Wi-Fi Scale Adds to America's Class Divide
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Transcript of How My Wi-Fi Scale Adds to America's Class Divide
I now have more health information on my wrist than my doctor had about me 10 years ago, and I’m
hopeful that it’s going to help keep me healthier.
But it’s worrisome, too, because the same technological change that allows any of us to walk
around with all this personal data at a glance...
may wind up exacerbating the growing gap in life expectancy between people with high levels
of income and education and those without.
When combined with information from doctors and other providers, it can present a picture of someone’s
well-being more nuanced than anything available before.
I know from experience, for example, that if I weigh myself most days, I am more likely to eat
nutritious foods and maintain my weight.
But I’ve never succeeded in recording the results consistently, which is unfortunate because doing so would provide a
useful history for my doctor, signaling potential health risks.
The admittedly minor hassle of looking down at the scale and then walking over to a computer to type in the numbers was
apparently so onerous that I would do so for only a couple days and then stop.
My wife and I now have a new Withings Wi-Fi scale: When I step on, it transmits my weight and body-fat
readings to the computer over our home Wi-Fi network.
Enter new devices like the Garmin Forerunner 610 watch and the Fitbit pedometer, both of
which I use.
The pedometer measures how many steps I take each day, and if I wear it on my wrist at night it can also measure the length and quality of my sleep.
Both devices transmit their results wirelessly to my computer whenever I walk by it, and that information, too, is automatically deposited into my health record.
My online record thus contains an extraordinarily rich array of information about how much I exercise, how
well I sleep, my blood pressure and my body mass.
It also pulls data on my prescriptions and other more traditional health metrics, such as blood-
test results.
As I write this, I’m wearing something called a VITAband, which is an emergency ID bracelet
that is linked to online information...
Importantly, with appropriate permission, it can also tap into my increasingly detailed
online health record.
(A particularly clever feature that isn’t directly connected to better health, except in the psychological sense, is the
VITAband’s built-in debit card,
which lets me make purchases or, if something goes terribly wrong when I’m out for a run, pay
for a cab ride home.)
But since the multiple sources of information about my health are now linked, anyone who could inappropriately
obtain access to one bit of data may...
have a better chance of getting into the entire record, unless the system is explicitly designed
to minimize that risk.
Presumably, all of this new information should be private, not available even to my doctor or health-
insurance company without my permission.
Americans are living longer than ever -- but, as documented in a recent National Academy of Sciences report (“Explaining
Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries”),
people with more education and income are enjoying much more rapid increases in
longevity than others are.
Among 50-year-old men, for example, those in the highest education group are now projected to live almost six years
longer on average than those in the lowest education group.
In 2007, men living in the American counties with the greatest average longevity could expect to live more than
15 years longer than men in the lowest-ranked ones.
For example, men 50 and older without a high-school education are more than twice as likely to
smoke as those with a college degree.
Among 45- to 54-year-olds in one study, only 16 percent of those without a high-school degree exercised vigorously at least once a week, whereas 56 percent of college graduates
did.
If the new personalized health technologies wind up being used disproportionately by people with more education and income,
driving that group toward even better health, they will probably cause the gap in life
expectancy to widen still further.
The true health-improving potential of devices such as the VITAband and the Fitbit will be realized only if they are used by those who most need to change their health behavior --
If not, just as technology has helped expand income inequality over the past four decades, it may likewise
play a major role in expanding life-span inequality.