Calit2 Director and CSE Prof. Larry Smarr made the front page of The Washington Post. The May 9 article, “The Human Upgrade: The Revolution Will Be Digitized” by technology writer Ariana Cha, explores the movement to quantify consumers’ health and lifestyles, spearheaded by a flood of wearable devices such as the FitBit and Apple Watch.
The article dubs Smarr “the unlikely hero of a global movement among ordinary people to ‘quantify’ themselves” using an estimated 211 million wearable monitoring devices to track their own health statistics (68 million devices shipped this year alone) – and using the knowledge to approach their physicians in new ways. “From the instant he wakes up each morning, through his workday and into the night, the essence of Larry Smarr is captured by a series of numbers: a resting heart rate of 40 beats per minute, a blood pressure of 130/70, a stress level of 2 percent, 191 pounds, 8,000 steps taken, 15 floors climbed, 8 hours of sleep,” is how Cha opens her feature article, adding: “Smarr, an astrophysicist and computer scientist, could be the world’s most self-measured man. For nearly 15 years, the professor at the University of California at San Diego has been obsessed with what he describes as the most complicated subject he has ever experimented on: his own body.” Smarr monitors more than 150 parameters related to his health and activity, and he compares his self-monitoring with the way many Americans monitor their own cars. "We know exactly how much gas we have, the engine temperature, how fast we are going," he is quoted as saying. "What I'm doing is creating a dashboard for my body." (Pictured: Smarr with some of the 150 parameters depicted on a wall display in Calit2's Qualcomm Institute; photo by Earnie Grafton for The Washington Post.)