I spend several hours every week exploring and discussing content on technology, business, and society, with a focus on mindfulness and well-being.
Every other Sunday, I send out a summary of the best material and themes I've found over the previous two weeks and some new ideas from me. These can include articles, podcasts, books, shows, gadgets, research papers, quotes, practices, practical tips, and more.
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Hi friends 👋,
Thanks for stopping by! These are my top picks and reflections for this week, centered around the theme of technology and behavior change.
3 Top Picks
I. ⌚️ Wearable sensors for behavior change
This week, I started beta testing the new continuous glucose monitor from Levels (more on this later). Here's an overview of some of my favorite consumer wearable sensors for measuring one or more biometric variables and why they matter.
💡 Ideas
Problems:
The healthcare and insurance system today doesn’t focus on preventative health. Physical exams, in general, happen once a year and analyze a single snapshot in time of one’s current conditions.
Most recommendations in terms of lifestyle choices are still given universally without taking into account each individual’s specificities. For example, no diet is one-size-fits-all, but they’re advertised as if they were.
We could instead monitor and course-correct our health in a preventative way through healthy lifestyle choices over the long term.
But, behavior change is hard.
Solution:
From the theory of habits, we know that the key to creating a good habit is to make it obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying.
Wearable devices can help by surfacing cues, throughout the day, about specific variables and patterns that we can learn from and act upon, with proper guidance from doctors, experts, and coaches.
They provide a feedback-loop mechanism that empowers users to experiment and create personalized plans.Game-like app design, through the use of coaching, continuous improvement, and goal achievement, can help make the experience enjoyable and satisfying. More on this later.
Consumer sensors and biometric variables:
Heart-rate and HRV (heart-rate variability).
HRV, a measure of the variation in the time interval between heartbeats, is the result of the activity of the autonomic nervous system and is widely considered one of the best objective metrics for physical fitness and determining the body’s readiness to perform.
Devices: Apple Watch, Whoop, Oura ring, Garmin, Fitbit, etc.CGM (continuous glucose monitor).
Apart from its obvious use for monitoring diabetes, it can be used for health and wellness purposes to identify pre-diabetic trends and optimize your metabolic health through better diet, sleep, exercise, and overall lifestyle.
Devices (requires a prescription): Abbott Freestyle Libre, Dexcom, Levels.GSR (galvanic skin response).
A measure of changes in sweat gland activity (skin conductance), which is not under conscious control, but modulated autonomously by sympathetic activity which drives aspects of human behavior as well as cognitive and emotional states.
Devices (currently only available in research settings, not for consumer use): Empatica Wristband, Shimmer GSR+.EEG (electroencephalography).
By measuring the electrical activity of the brain, these sensors can provide feedback on mental activity. One of the most interesting applications is to provide guidance during meditation sessions.
Devices: Muse headband.
Challenges:
As with all technology, sensors carry several orders of implications, both positive and negative. Among these, the interpretationof the data they produce is not always straightforward and it should often rely on expert guidance and coaching to make sure that the suggested changes are effective and not counterproductive.
The most useful future applications of wearables will come from distilling insights out of multiple data inputs and sensors into combined and actionable insights and recommendations.
Fun fact: while preparing this topic, someone let me know about this early attempt in 2005 to build a biofeedback videogame that leverages HRV and GSR to teach meditation: The Journey to Wild Divine. You can also find this hilarious parody walkthrough that shows how many things can go wrong when technology comes ahead of its time!
🔗 Links
Everything You Need to Know About Heart Rate Variability (Whoop)
The Secret Levels Master Plan (Levels blog)
Gatorade’s new Gx Sweat Patch tests your sweat for smarter hydration (The Verge)
II. 🎮 Game-like apps
This recent Twitter thread by Jon Lai (@Tocelot) at a16z provides a great framework to describe how some of today’s top apps are designed as games.
💡 Ideas
Many popular apps today are games in disguise. Being “game-like” is a design principle that describes traits of the core user experience. This is different from traditional gamification, where some mechanics like points and badges are simply added to enhance the product.
A general framework for game-like experiences:
1) Motivation: why do users want to use an app?
Via intrinsic goals that they develop for themselves, e.g. becoming as skilled as someone else (relatedness), learning and overcoming challenges (competence), and figuring out how to do something (autonomy).
2) Mastery: what are the rules of the app?
There has to be a way to learn the path to mastery, i.e. how to win. Users invest time and expect a return in new skills and competence.
The path to mastery should be fair and based on skill/choice, not luck.
Goals should feel challenging yet attainable.
3) Feedback: how will users learn those rules?
The best games teach through iterative feedback loops. Users need a way to learn the rules and systems as they go.
I recommend reading the tweet to see great real-life examples of how this framework is implemented in the apps we use every day.
III. 🌱 Design principles of humane/mindful technology
Since we’re talking about technology that enables behavior change and design principles, this is a great thread by Tristan Harris on what humane technology may look like that I went back to and revisited this week.
💡 Ideas
The major problem in technology isn't privacy, it is its misalignment with our innate psychological vulnerabilities.
First and second-order implications of today’s approach to technology are rooted in fundamental human weaknesses:
Cognitive limits -> Information overload -> Short Attention spans.
Dopamine -> Addictive use -> Isolation.
Social validation -> Mass narcissism -> Teen depression.
Confirmation bias -> Fake news -> Breakdown of sensemaking.
Outrage -> Polarization -> Extremism & distrust.
Foundations of trust -> Bots, DeepFakes -> Post-truth world.An aspirational new design paradigm for humane technology:
1 Idea from Me
💭 On Levels and using technology to nurture self-awareness
As mentioned earlier, I recently started beta testing the new continuous glucose monitor from Levels. Even though the device currently requires a medical prescription (which Levels automatically provides), it is only meant to be used by healthy individuals for wellness and lifestyle monitoring and improvement.
Check out their blog for resources on the program, metabolic health, and the role of blood glucose and insuline.
Levels is a software layer built on top of a wearable sensor (patch) that provides a continuous feedback loop on the state of your blood glucose.
Every time you eat or exercise, you can monitor how your body reacts, with a score assigned to each response period (“zone”). Contextual cards and links provide learning material that explains certain patterns and provide tips on possible modifications that could improve your results. Additional “challenges” motivate you to test alternative foods (e.g. white versus brown rice). These are all early signs of a game-like experience.
The question/provocation that I’ve been pondering over the last few days:
by providing cues and insights about our present experience, can technology help us nurture self-awareness?
Whether it’s through a sensor and a game-like app that incentivise mindful eating or one that promotes pausing and breathing, I believe there are some early positive signs, but it will ultimately come down to making wise design choices to make sure that the game-like qualities are helpful to serve the user instead of being an additional tool for information overload, addictive use, and social validation.
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PS: From today, I will start sending out these emails twice a month on Sundays instead of Saturdays.
Be well and be kind,
Matteo