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The Case for Tracking Everything

gizmodo.com · 1,693 words · saved by 1 readers

If every step taken, hour slept, and heartbeat can be measured, recorded, and analyzed, are we taking control of our health or losing the plot entirely?

The original health tracker was, in a way, destined to fail. When Fitbit released its first wearable health tracker in 2009, new users were typically prompted to set their daily step target to 10,000 steps. That number wasn’t arbitrary. While Fitbit might have been the first mass-market health tracker in the United States, it was far from the original. In 1965, a Japanese clock-making company called Yamasa Tokei Keiki debuted the first consumer pedometer. The device was named the Manpo-kei, which translates to “10,000 steps meter” in Japanese. How the company settled on 10,000 steps has…

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