I think that’s a pretty good point, and it tracks with Steven Byrnes’ insight about bedwetting alarms.
Zoom costs no money, but the most it saves is time and annoyance. It might save lives occasionally, but there’s potential for wearable health to save lots of lives and prevent many disabilities. The cost-benefit ratio might be better than zoom’s, and yet people may neglect it excessively because it’s socially weird to do things like monitor your heartrate—or, when it’s available, your blood glucose—routinely using consumer electronics. As with the bedwetting alarm, we have this idea that we should only be using “interventions” like these when there’s already a clear problem, rather than as a way to prevent a problem or hasten a solution, and that seems to stem from social norms (“is this really such an emergency?”) rather than a rational judgment about costs and benefits.
That said, one of my criteria was “Had an immediate payoff,” and I think that neither the bedwetting alarm nor wearable healthy typically do have an immediate payoff (unless you were replacing an existing invasive glucose monitor with an Apple Watch noninvasive monitor, once that tech becomes available).
With zoom, all people were missing was the suggestion “why don’t we have this meeting on zoom” and the perception that “if we do, it will be seen as normal by all participants.” With wearable health, you have the added component of “I’m not even sure all this fuss and self-monitoring will even pay off in the long run in terms of better health outcomes, but I have to pay the money and attention costs right now.”
The delayed and uncertain cost-benefit analysis in individual cases is the reason that wearable health doesn’t meet my higher “stringency bar” for being comparable to zoom, even though I agree with you that there are probably a lot of users who’d benefit from it and who are neglecting it primarily for the reason that it’s not normalized.
I think that’s a pretty good point, and it tracks with Steven Byrnes’ insight about bedwetting alarms.
Zoom costs no money, but the most it saves is time and annoyance. It might save lives occasionally, but there’s potential for wearable health to save lots of lives and prevent many disabilities. The cost-benefit ratio might be better than zoom’s, and yet people may neglect it excessively because it’s socially weird to do things like monitor your heartrate—or, when it’s available, your blood glucose—routinely using consumer electronics. As with the bedwetting alarm, we have this idea that we should only be using “interventions” like these when there’s already a clear problem, rather than as a way to prevent a problem or hasten a solution, and that seems to stem from social norms (“is this really such an emergency?”) rather than a rational judgment about costs and benefits.
That said, one of my criteria was “Had an immediate payoff,” and I think that neither the bedwetting alarm nor wearable healthy typically do have an immediate payoff (unless you were replacing an existing invasive glucose monitor with an Apple Watch noninvasive monitor, once that tech becomes available).
With zoom, all people were missing was the suggestion “why don’t we have this meeting on zoom” and the perception that “if we do, it will be seen as normal by all participants.” With wearable health, you have the added component of “I’m not even sure all this fuss and self-monitoring will even pay off in the long run in terms of better health outcomes, but I have to pay the money and attention costs right now.”
The delayed and uncertain cost-benefit analysis in individual cases is the reason that wearable health doesn’t meet my higher “stringency bar” for being comparable to zoom, even though I agree with you that there are probably a lot of users who’d benefit from it and who are neglecting it primarily for the reason that it’s not normalized.