Health monitoring devices: A personal perspective

(Editor's note: This is the first of an ongoing series of blogs)

Forty-six, clinically obese, diabetic and generally feeling lousy; all of these are health traits that often accompany many people in what some refer to as “middle age.” Unfortunately, this also describes my current health condition.

I know I need to change my health habits. I’ve tried many fitness and dieting techniques, all with temporary results. The largest issue that makes improving my health difficult is the inability to easily track what I’m putting into my body and how much activity I’m doing every day. Finally, my improvement seems so slow – with virtually no visible progress – that I quickly become discouraged and fall back into old, familiar and unhealthy habits.

When I was asked to list yearly personal goals at work, I decided to try a very unscientific experiment using myself as a guinea pig. The goal: Wear a personal health monitoring device and share my observations on what works and what doesn’t about this device and the process, writing once a week for one year.

(One note, in fairness to the companies that produce these devices, I’m not going to reveal the specific device I’ll be using. This blog is really about my personal experience while using this device and how effective I find the process.)

The first task was to figure out which device I wanted to use. My criteria were simple: The device should be simple to use, track my daily activity, allow me to enter my blood glucose data and log food intake, require little to no maintenance and allow for both automatic and manual uploading of data to both my computer and some type of cloud.

I happily received my device this week and am excited to get started. I’m less than 24 hours into the process and happy to report that I’m finding the information to be fascinating and very helpful. So far, the process is much more intriguing that I originally envisioned. Also, having access to this data presents this experiment as somewhat of a game.

Another observation is that seeing very small increments of progress is extremely helpful for me, and as the numbers show improvement, even if it’s in very small units of measurement, this motivates me and keeps me in a positive state of mind.

So, 24 hours into the process and I’m off and running (well, more like walking). I look forward to next week’s report.

Tim Castallo is a coordinator for mHIMSS.