My bike is still sending its own little blog stream into the cloud. It's not exactly writing its own posts, but logs how long it's been out, where it's been and other 'quantified self' statistics like my heart rate, cadence and an estimate of wattage.
Naturally, I switched most of the options to 'private' so that I could access the information without it being published to the whole wide world.
Just for fun today, I decided to see where this kind of information streaming could lead, as organisations are beginning to turn attention to 'wrist share' as a way to get further marketing and demographic information.
So, I detached the bike gizmo and walked into the supermarket with the data logging still switched on. The diagram above shows my apparently raggedy route around the supermarket and my detailed private logging even shows footsteps and heart rate, which actually rose slightly at the checkout.
When I visited The Crystal in east London a few weeks ago, the RFID card they provided when I started to look around provided this kind of tracking, but it's interesting to see that with wearable technology (like a fitness tracker) there's already much of this routine functionality available.
Some supermarkets already use aspects of this detection technology for queue management, and public transport is eyeing it up for congestion control.
I explicitly allowed it to be used for my tracking in my supermarket visit, but I wonder what will happen as equivalent new functions are exploited from phones (e.g. through near field communications) and to wearable technology such as watches?
Shades of that 60's show and its village?
1 comment:
I can see why your heart rate would rise at the checkout... The price of things these days! :)
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