Ultimate Self-Tracker: Larry Smarr
It started in 2000 with a simple log of his body weight and food intake. Within eight years, Larry Smarr was having his feces analyzed for microbial content. Smarr became the ultimate quantified-selfer, building a computational map of his body that makes electronic medical records look like ancient hieroglyphics. And as director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, in La Jolla, Calif., he has every resource available to him.
His tools range from the pedestrian to the most exclusive technologies. He wears commercially available gadgets that track movement, steps, sleep, heart rate, and stress. He sends his blood and stool samples out for lab analysis several times a year. Based on MRI data, he has built an interactive model of his colon using 18 gaming PCs linked to 3-D display screens. And most recently, he had all the microbes in his gut genetically sequenced by the J. Craig Venter Institute.
This kind of data collection is not for the fainthearted. “If you had seven years of blood work and stool, you’d probably find things about yourself that you don’t want to know,” he says. For Smarr, it was watching his C-reactive protein, a blood marker that rises in response to inflammation, double in 2008. It turned out he had Crohn’s disease, an incurable inflammatory bowel disease, and his data alerted him to the problem before his doctors saw it.
Smarr thinks self-quantification is the future of health care and that pooling everyone’s biometric data will lead to better understanding of diseases and earlier cures. “It will take the engagement of the medical community with the quantified-self community,” he says.
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Love and light being, Teo
