The Ultimate Guide To Convert Humans Into Tamagotchis — January 26th, 2010

Data Analysis, Monitoring, Vital Signs, Web 2.0

More than a decade ago, small, portable digital creatures broke out into the streets. Being aware of their pixelated vital signs was a fundamental task in keeping them alive and happy. Today 2010, a galaxy of applications has come out trying to Tamagotchize our lives. A large set of tools that persistently record each one of our breaths is here to presumably assist us in improve our quality of life. Curious to Tamagotchize your life?

The Tamagotchi Inspired Dashboard

According to Wikipedia, the Tamagotchi is a handheld digital pet created in 1996 by Aki Maita and sold by Bandai. Over 70 million Tamagotchis have been sold since 2008. The Tamagotchi is housed in a small and simple egg-shaped computer. Three buttons (A, B, and C) allow the user to select and perform an activity. These activities include feeding the Tamagotchi a snack, playing games, cleaning up pet's virtual waste, marrying other Tamagotchis, and checking some statistics.

It is precisely the issue of checking Tamagotchi's statistics that has motivated this post. Let me explain.
One of the screens of a Tamagotchi was dedicated to keep feedback about its psychophysiological conditions, say for example level of hunger, happiness or discipline. By looking at this screen one can see full or empty hearts indicating the completion degree for a given metric. That was the symbolic representation for all Tamagotchi's pseudo-vital signs.
That pseudo-statistics could seem ridiculous, and maybe they are, but these hearts actually became the key indicators to keep the pixelated pet alive, and healthy to grow, marry and form a family.

Ok but, what do Tamagotchi stats have to do with humans? Well, answering this question is as simple as looking at our most immediate techno-surroundings. We'll easily notice a huge upcoming movement of widgets, gadgets, and 2.0 websites hungry for data of human origin. Do you want to track your 24-hour physical activity? Yes, we can. Do you want to monitor how much TV you sit through? Yes, we can. Do you want to score sleep quality or sexual satisfaction? Yes, we can. Nutritional quality? Money forecasting? Ecological footprint? Yes, Yes, Yes.

Monitoring Health

This is probably the most exploited niche over the last couple of years ago. Those watches capable of displaying our heart rate are behind us, today we're facing with a galaxy of widgets ready to monitor up to the smell of our feet.
Some few examples: DirectLife, TheCarrot, and Zeo.

• Philips has recently launched DirectLife, a program with which we can observe who's the calorie-burner leader in the neighborhood.
  DirectLife is based around a wearable device which tracks all our movements. Recorded data is uploaded to a personal web-page in which results are visualized as amount of calories burnt. Optionally, we can match our personal scoring against other user targets.
• TheCarrot.com goes one step forward not only tracking fitness activity but also monitoring all our health related habits including diet, weight, exercise, and medicines. TheCarrot website functionalities are based on purpose-specific trackers. The list of trackers includes everything from body measurements or exercise to TV habits and sleep quality.
  So with this tool we could determine bizarre things such as the impact of our TV consumption on our lovemaking performance.
• Zeo is tag lined as "your personal sleep coach". This is the definitive gadget we were waiting for to demonstrate whether if counting sheep or penguins is more effective to put ourselves to sleep.
  The concept relies on a headband that safely records our sleep patterns through the electrical signals naturally produced by the brain. All the data is visualizable either on the Zeo Bedside Display or myZeo Personal Coaching website. The resultant reports include a personal sleep score, and graphs with our light, deep and REM moments.

Monitoring Money

Being aware of how much money we carry in our pocket is important. But it is much more useful to contract an algorithmic based personal assistant to take care of each one of our pennies.
Give a spin to Mint, PocketSmith, and SmartyPig.

• Mint is one of the most popular online tools to manage our money. It ensures us to centralize all our incomes and expenses, to find instant savings, and to provide budgeting tools. The service also provides mobile access to our data, being able to check our balances anywhere.
  Mint is like having a financial advisor in our pocket, watching over our budget and telling us off in case we waste precious money on unnecessary goods.
• In a similar attempt to manage our money, we can find PocketSmith. The added value of this online tool is that it acts as a cash forecaster, predicting balance and planning our budget for the next weeks. The web-based application also monitors our actual expenses against our expected forecast, aiming to help us to achieve financial goals.
• Have you ever had one of those perky piggy banks? Well, SmartyPig is the 2.0 version of our childhood's pink pig-shaped money box, and it assists us to achieve desired savings. The process consist on setting up our goals, such as dream vacations, holiday gifts or cutting edge electronics. Within the wanted time frame, the application offers unique options to reach our goal. And it is social, so we can share goals with friends and family using Facebook or MySpace.

Monitoring Love

Social networks are turning heads those days, and it seems to be a challenge on measuring personal success. Just observe simple indicators such as Twitter followers or Facebook friends. However, some web tools take advantage of this emergent tendency by providing advanced metrics to measure our social prosperity.
Let's consider Twitalyzer and Bedpost.

• Twitalyzer is a social media analytics application. The nice thing of Twitalyzer is that it translates the data from our twitter accounts into human values such as generosity, influence or engagement.
  By looking over Twitalyzer reports we can realize what is the current state of our 2.0 social relations.
• One more explicit alternative is Bedpost, the online application that tracks our sex lives. Bedpost works around a calendar in which we can enter not just the day of our sexual encounters, but also the duration of the affair, descriptive tags and a star-based rating of the experience. The application summarizes all the information on a dashboard including detailed statistics, totals, time records, and average rating.
  I suspect with Bedpost Dr. Love has found a brand new reporting tool to monitor the progress of his patients.

Bonus Tracks

Say green bonus tracks. Because we are more and more aware of the impact that humans have over the environment, an upward trend in green gadgets is here to stay.
Some cutting-edge examples are eco:Drive, Yello Strom, and Google PowerMeter.

• eco:Drive is an initiative from Fiat. eco:Drive is a computer application that helps us improve how efficiently we drive. It analyses our driving style and help us to use less fuel, reducing carbon dioxide emissions. All the driving data is stored in a USB stick plugged into the car.
• If we want to keep all our energy consumption monitored, Yello Strom meter is a good candidate. The cool thing about these meters is that each one comes with a unique Twitter account built-in. So the owner can control in-house power consumption through the automatic tweets that the device posts regularly.
• The omnipotent Google makes real his personal vision of electricity consumption with Google PowerMeter, a project of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm. It is a free energy monitoring tool that provides a custom dashboard with detailed information on how much energy our home is consuming. Google PoweMeter receives data from smart meters such as AlertMe Energy.

In Conclusion

At this point one can honestly assert that the applications listed here are not an isolated thing, but rather they form part of a complex growing phenomenon.

The key to success may be the fact that they satisfy the need —or obsession— that all human beings have to measure everything measurable. And quite apart from measuring, these tools do that in a fresh manner, considering interactivity and customization above all. Moreover, some of the tools look so cool, and not only accomplish with their function but they do so kind of fun.
These peculiarities reinforce user engagement, which is essential to continue using the application and achieve our goals, whether be more physically fit, or spend less money, or become more eco-friendly.

You gonna jump to Tamagotchization?