Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Wellness Monitor, Cool Gadget or Little Brother?

Ok, so you want to track your daily movements and sleep cycles? This is the gadget for you. Using the on board accelerometer to detect intensity and duration of movement, steps, distance, and elevation, it also calculates the number of calories burned. It has a "sensor is small enough to fit into the included wristband even as you sleep, where it will track tiny tremors in the wrist to tell just how long it took for you to fall asleep, the number of times you wake up."

Using bluetooth, this information is uploaded to the manufacturer website which we hope isn't linked into the government Medicare computers. I like the idea, but having the data uploaded somewhere seems less than private and more George Orwellian. Sometimes I think George Orwell was somewhat right, but instead of Big Brother watching, we have a whole lotta Little Brothers keeping track of us.

Here's the LINK.

1 comment:

Fitbit User said...

I have a fitbit - same model in your picture. It's kinda awesome, actually. And I could literally register it under any name I chose using any random throwaway email address. If Uncle Sam is expending enough time and energy to track down my individual step counter for some reason, well, he's probably already looking at my electronic medical records too.