Our connected life, through the increase of wareables and the IoT is undeniably impacting directly our way of living.

When it comes to the way we manage and even consume information, we can see that both our customer experience and our consumer behaviors are changing, affecting us on different ways whether we want information, knowledge and products to be available right away, with a premium experience, and with the ability to share it on social networks.

The increase in sensors in our wareables, and the fact that we can litteraly track everything we do in a day, how much we move, what we eat, how we sleep and put objectives on it, can have a positive impact on our well-being as long as we do not fall in the prison of data obsession.

Ther are many examples of how wareables actually directly or indirectly includes functionnalities to change our habits, like a the “move mode” in activity trackers that basically tells you “ok, you are sitting for an hour, now move a bit before to be sealed in your seat”.

The point here is not so much to discuss the different wareables that could help you because there are many great websites such as wareable.com  that are doing it everyday.

The only point is that, whatever we think about the impact of the activity trackers in the race for personal data management, they are tools that can help to change our habits, to become more active, or at least to be aware of our level of activity in a day.

That is why I think we can consider that these tools have their utility and are actually like small coaches that can help us to have more healthy habits.

And finally, when looking at the ideas shared by authors such as Vivek Wadhwa in his last book “the driver in the driverless car” in which Vivek describes a future (close to us actually) where we will use our activity tracker to follow our general health including our heart rate, stress level and tiredness, we can understand how much they can be useful and objective tools to support us toward an healthier life.

We can definitely challenge the race for data and the obsession that can be linked to over-connectivity, but the use of activity trackers may be one of the friend of our well-being in a very near future.