The Quantified Self: From 1970s Sousveillance Rigs to Smart Baby Socks

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Self-tracking with wearable computers goes back to the 1970s, when early adopters practiced sousveillance, recording their own lives from eye level while hauling heavy battery packs and bulky cameras. By 2002 there were formal proposals for quantimetric self-sensing that would pair biological sensors, such as blood sugar monitors, with lifelong video capture to correlate what people ate with how their bodies responded. In 2007 in San Francisco, Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly coined the term quantified self, built around the idea of self-knowledge through numbers. Wolf gave a TED talk on the movement in 2010, and the first international conference was held in Mountain View, California, in May 2011. Practitioners call their work personal science: self-directed N of 1 studies using smartwatches, glucose monitors, one-button trackers, journals and simple tools like linear regression.

The movement then reached the nursery. Parents log feeding, sleep, diapers and milestones, and sensor-equipped jumpsuits and smart socks track a baby's breathing, heart rate and movement, often out of fear of sudden infant death syndrome, which critics say can feed a cycle of hypervigilance. Wider criticism targets data fetishism, a reductionist view of health, a lack of health literacy to interpret the numbers, the burden of tracking illness, and tracking imposed by employers, insurers and addiction programs.

• A 2010 study in the journal Leisure Studies of 125 trail runners found that sharing self-collected exercise data online boosted motivation.
• Pediatricians tell parents to record feeding and other activities in the first months to check weight targets or help diagnose reflux.
• The European Health Literacy Survey Consortium defines health literacy as the ability to access, understand, appraise and apply health information.
• A study of self-tracking among Parkinson's disease patients found constant symptom logging burdensome and recommended interpreting results with health care providers.
• Critics compare a smartwatch to a two-way mirror, with commercial, governmental and marketing interests watching from the other side.