(image source | Caring Blog)
I love seeing the simplistic beauty that is the imagination of a child grow with an individual, leading to technological benefits for society. This recent Wired article on making monitoring of one’s health fun describes just such a tale. I remember being a lad in elementary school when half of my class was playing with those beeper like toys that mimicked the needs of an infant. They needed to be fed, changed and all the other tasks an infant would require done, or they would die. No doubt those kids who once played with these toys are now applying those same tactics of making health care for an imaginary child fun, into making one’s own healthcare fun. While this may seem like a simple idea, hooking a monitoring device up to one’s belt to monitor heart rates, blood sugar levels and beyond, tying it into an almost game like activity is ingenious. As a member of the Facebook community, I receive hundreds of updates a day of friends needing help building a barn in Farmville, or having rocket launchers to sell in Mob Wars, indicating that people love the structure of bettering their lives, even if they are, in these cases, fake. Applying the desire that exist in people into a way to better their actual lives is what makes this concept brilliant. I will inject one factor I hope will be incorporated into these devices as they become more a part of everyday life, the ability to shut them off from time to time! One doesn’t always need to know that what they are doing is bad for them, after all what would be the fun in life without a little self-destruction!
Be sure to read the Wired article posted after the jump to learn more about this emerging technology.
In the mid 1990s, a craze swept Japan and crested its way onto American shores: Kids were going crazy for the Tamagotchi, an egg-shaped digital pet. Every few hours, users would press a couple buttons to feed their Tamagotchi, play with it, or clean it up. The game was simple, but intensely rewarding. Users cried when their Tamagotchis got sick or died; they were elated when they were able to raise a healthy, happy pet. More than 70 million have been sold.
The genius of the device was that it was both simple and rewarding: It took just a few clicks a few times a day to keep your TamagotchisTamagotchi in good health. In other words, it rewarded vigilance over neglect, maintenance over obsessiveness (you could overfeed your Tamagotchi or smother it with too much love).
A decade later, there’s a new kind of Tamagotchi out there. And it’s us.
Continue reading the Thomas Goetz article on Wired.
Source | Wired Magazine
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