For Christmas, I got one of those bracelets that tracks your activity, like the number of steps you take in a day and the number of hours you sleep at night.
It coils around my wrist like a baby snake, counting silently.
I find this both fascinating and a bit creepy.
There’s an app on my iPhone that talks to my bracelet. I imagine them huddling together, over beers maybe, laughing at my pledge to work off that second slice of chocolate cake by taking the stairs at work.
When I set up the app there was a pop-up window that asked essentially: Do you mind if our eye-in-the-sky computer records your activities for the good of all mankind?
I tapped OK to clear the screen, but now I’m having second thoughts. It’s like donating your brain to science when you’re not dead yet and you’re not sure if your brain has on clean underwear.
I’m hoping that, since I type on a keyboard at work, my little activity bracelet will mistake every keystroke for a galloping stride and will report to the fitness gods that I am — amazingly — sprinting 20 miles a day. But there’s another, more paranoid part of my brain that wonders if my bracelet is in communication with my seventh-grade gym teacher, who rolled his eyes when I couldn’t climb a rope, hand-over-hand, past the second knot.
My activity bracelet is pretty primitive since it only tracks walking and resting. You can input your food intake and daily weight, but I’m too lazy to do that. And even if I wasn’t, paper and pencil work just as well.
Still, it’s fascinating to tap on my iPhone and see how many steps I’ve taken on a given day. As I sit at my desk now, it’s 11:09 a.m. and I’m only about 15 percent of the way to my daily goal of 10,000 steps, a round number that fitness experts say is a good goal for moderately active people like me. A lunch-hour walk should put me back on track.
There are more expensive activity bracelets that keep track of your heart rate and other vital statistics. Can a bracelet with a blood-pressure cuff be far behind?
I predict that some day soon a health insurance company will offer its customers a big discount on premiums if they agree to wear a tricked-out fitness tracker full-time. This bracelet will, of course, dutifully report everything you do — or don’t do — back to the home office.
But mark my words, today’s good-citizen discount will be tomorrow’s punitive cost. Remember when non-smokers got a little discount for good behavior? Now, smokers get hammered on health insurance.
If your insurance company takes the path with fitness trackers, I suggest you take your bracelet to the Sherwin-Williams store and let it ride the paint-shaker for an hour, which should fool your insurance company into thinking that you’ve just run to Kentucky and back.
If they really wanted to make a bracelet that will help you lose weight, they should design one that administers an electric shock every time you raise a fork to your lips, or texts you the word “FATTY” every time it detects pie on your breath.
If you don’t think this whole insurance thing is possible, then you may not know that big insurance companies such as State Farm and Progressive are already offering discounts to customers who agree to put a nanny device on their vehicles to track speed, acceleration, braking and miles driven.
As a father of two sons who will one day want to drive, I love this idea for teen drivers. For example, State Farm’s In-Drive device will report a car’s location and speed in real time — a priceless feature for parents who want to track their kids’ movements.
But on the flip side, I’m worried that we’re getting perilously close to a world where all aspects of our lives will be recorded, measured and reported in the name of creating a utopian meritocracy where every virtue is rewarded and every careless deed — no matter how trivial — is punished.
In this robot world, we all will be coached to be happy, healthy and safely above average.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my wristband just buzzed me. It’s time for my midday walk.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.