The Monitored Self

With the growth of smart devices, wearables and remote monitoring there is a major opportunity for individuals to learn more about themselves, their physiological variables and how things change with time, activity, emotions, strong coffee, and various external stimuli and stressors. This is not just for curiosity and narcissism, but it allows individuals a window into the inner workings of their own complex physiology, something that was never previously easily available. The benefit of such insights is bio-feedback—understanding how your own unique biological markers respond to the world. This in turns enables ‘performance management’ of the self. Controlling, adapting, changing and modifying inputs in order to achieve the right outputs or target goals from glucose stabilisation to weight loss, to blood pressure control and more. This is not just the realm of the dedicated ultra-athlete it’s becoming an emerging reality for the masses.