.future · Microsoft / Gimlet Creative

My Data, My Health, My Self

July 5, 2017·24 min·2 clips

Chris Dancy weighed 320 pounds and smoked two packs a day before a naked photo on Facebook forced him to change.

The episode opens with Chris Dancy's self-described rock bottom in 2008: 320 pounds, three packs of cigarettes a day, up to 36 Diet Cokes, weekend-long drinking, and recreational drug use. A Facebook photo of himself naked except for a pink cowboy hat became the catalyst for change. Drawing on his tech background, Chris built a color-coded personal dashboard inspired by Maslow's hierarchy of needs, tracking health, finances, socializing, and spirituality. He now uses over 700 sensors and devices — including swallowable pills with internal sensors, brainwave-measuring headbands, and smart aromatherapy diffusers — to monitor everything from heart rate and blood oxygen to ambient noise and light levels. The data revealed specific behavioral patterns, such as eating faster in noisy rooms, allowing him to adjust his environment proactively. His data-driven approach got him fired by his doctor of 20 years, who felt the information was second-guessing his medical training, though Chris eventually found a more receptive physician. Journalist Gary Wolf, who coined the term 'Quantified Self,' contextualizes Chris's approach within a broader movement of life-loggers who run self-experiments and share results at global meetups, though Wolf acknowledges the challenge of small sample sizes and the lack of infrastructure for publishing personal health discoveries. The episode then shifts to Microsoft's Project Premonition, led by researcher Ethan Jackson, which aims to detect epidemics before they reach hospitals. Jackson notes that current epidemic detection happens too late — after people are already sick — and that 60–75% of emerging diseases originate in animals. His team is using mosquitoes as biological blood-sampling devices, combined with drone-deployed smart traps, gene sequencing, and cloud-based machine learning, to map pathogen movement in real time. The goal is a disease forecast analogous to a weather map, predicting outbreak risk by location, temperature, and humidity. The episode then introduces Reedy Tarial, CEO of NextGenJane, who at 33 wanted to assess her fertility timeline but was told by her doctor that the AMH hormone test could only be prescribed after a year of failed attempts to conceive. Frustrated by this gatekeeping, Reedy used her biomedical enterprise degree to found a company developing a system to test menstrual blood for AMH using a standard tampon, eliminating the need for clinical blood draws. A major lab refused to work with the product, calling it a 'dirty tampon,' but Reedy reframed the rejection as a competitive moat. NextGenJane is entering its third clinical trial and aims to raise $50 million to bring the product to market by 2021. Reedy argues that giving women precise fertility data could reduce anxiety, improve life planning, and in aggregate help close the gender pay gap by reducing the 'mommy tax' — the career penalties women incur from taking on primary caregiving roles. The episode closes with Ziad Sankari of CardioDiagnostics, whose software allows remote real-time cardiac monitoring outside hospitals. Sankari frames the current moment as analogous to the invention of the printing press: just as the Bible was once locked in Latin accessible only to priests, health data is currently locked in clinical language accessible only to physicians, and technology is the key to democratizing that access.

As heard by us

A sharp .future episode about health data, from Chris Dancy's breaking point to mosquitoes as early warning sensors.

My Data, My Health, My Self opens with Chris Dancy at a grim 2008 low: 320 pounds, heavy smoking, constant Diet Coke, long weekends of drinking and drugs, and one humiliating Facebook photo that tells him something has to change.

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Why you'd press play

A health scare, a mosquito strategy, and a big-data race to catch disease sooner.

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