The technology is inherently social. Many users share their body metrics with friends, family and even co-workers as readily as they would pictures from their travels to distant countries or their late-night bar adventures.  “When I talk to my parents, they are paranoid about their health data being stolen, but it doesn’t bother me,” said Halle Tecco, the 31-year-old co-founder and managing director of Rock Health. The digital health incubator in San Francisco is funding a number of next-generation wearables and monitors, such as a software program that assesses Alzheimer’s risk by analyzing eye movements with a cellphone camera and a band being tested as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder that analyzes skin responses.  Mollie McDowell, 26, marketing manager at Rock Health, openly talks online about how she has had a pain in her right hip for years and has tried several iPhone apps to try to find the cause and to track her mood and menstrual cycle.  “I think there is a lot of insight you can learn about yourself this way,” she said in an interview. In late April, she tweeted to the world, “Found out I’m Vitamin D deficient.”  Daniel Gartenberg, organizer of the Washington, D.C.-based meetups for Quantified Self, an international group of more than 29,000 self-trackers, has written several apps that helped track his own sleep that he has made available to the public. “I had mild insomnia,” said the doctoral candidate in applied cognition at George Mason University, “but have hacked it away.”  This openness extends to the citizen-scientists’ willingness to share information for the greater good. Thirty-four percent of health trackers share their data or notes with someone else, according to a Pew Research Center study.  In March, when Apple announced its ResearchKit initiative to allow people to share their information with researchers working on projects in asthma, heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer and Parkinson’s through various apps, more than 41,000 people volunteered within the first five days.  It’s unclear whether young adults’ open attitude toward sharing their data will remain when the next generation of more invasive biotrackers becomes commonplace.  Ginger.io, which was developed by data scientists from MIT, has created an app that can alert a provider if something is “off” — signaling the possibility of depression or a manic episode — based on how much a patient moves around or how many people they talk to that day so that counseling or other intervention can be offered.  Silicon Valley-based Proteus Digital Health has developed a prototype of an ingestible chip the size of a grain of sand that can be embedded in a pill. When the pill is swallowed, the chip sends a signal that’s logged on to central servers that you — or a loved one or doctor — can access on your phone or desktop.
Spearheaded by the flood of wearable devices, a movement to quantify consumers’ lifestyles is evolving into big business with immense health and privacy ramifications