الصحة والتكنولوجيا: ماذا يحمل لنا المستقبل؟

A couple of days ago, I spent an entire day gaming. I felt guilty afterwards, I know, well – sort of know – that there’s a tonne of health issues associated with being sedentary, but I try and avoid thinking about them, I think most of us do. A full day of sitting down, barely moving, it was bound to have been terrible for my health.

I got my phone out to look at my health info for the day, mostly out of morbid curiosity. I’ve got a smartwatch that does all the usual heartrate and stress tracking stuff.

I was shocked at what I saw.

I didn’t know whether to be pleasantly surprised, embarrassed, or horrified. Whilst my resting heart rate is typically a very unexciting mid-sixties, I’d been well over 100 for the entire gaming session – peaking at over 180 (!) during particularly tense and climactic periods.

Was I dying? Was this some sort of fitness hack I’d accidentally stumbled on? I did what most of us would do in that situation; I fell down a Google rabbit hole.

Can gaming be good for us?

The short answer seemed to be ‘maybe?’ The long answer was that it was a deeply complex question. Specifically, when it came to high heart rate for an extended gaming session, the increase in heart rate was due to my body being flooded with adrenaline. I cared about the outcome of the game (it was a tournament), it was mentally demanding, and the competition was fierce. When all these factors line up, our bodies load us up with chemicals – thinking that whatever task we’re engaged with might be urgent for our survival.

A famous Stanford University study once examined how many calories a chess player burned over the course of a day during a tournament, with the findings concluding that it was around 6000, three times higher than a typical day’s activity, all from just sitting down and concentrating. This increased burn was due to increased breathing rates, higher blood pressure and even muscle contractions. As my freefall through Google search results continued, there was also a bunch of information about the neurological benefits from engaging in the complex problem solving associated with a lot of games; that all seemed good news; I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then I got thinking again.

The quickened breathing, the elevated blood pressure – that’s all just stress, right? Stress is bad for us; we all know that. Having high blood pressure can induce all sorts of cardiovascular problems. There was also a pile of papers and articles all on how screen time affected our health in general – and that didn’t look good either. I put a pin in that for later.

It looked like I was facing one of those annoying, nuanced topics without an easy answer. Plus, it got me thinking – on every side of this issue sat technology. I was engaging with tech when I was gaming, I used a smartphone to analyse the results of my smartwatch. I had googled information about stress levels and gaming. Tech. Tech. Tech.

I started thinking more broadly about how technology and our health are becoming increasingly intertwined. Were leaps forward in technology driving improvements or problems with our collective health? My indulgent treat of a giant gaming session is close to an average day for many UK teenagers – what did that mean for our collective health in the future? Something to be concerned about, or was I just fretting over nothing?

It seemed like an important issue to understand, and one that I was woefully ignorant of.

The research rabbit hole got deeper. Here’s what I found:

Drop us back a hundred years. You want a meal? You probably need to walk to go and pick up the ingredients. That also goes for most things in your life. Your town or city is built on the presumption that you need to be able to walk to reach your destination, so walk you do – not that you likely have many other options.

Fwoof.

Calories burnt.

The food that you’re purchasing is likely fresh, sourced locally and not loaded up with sugar. Plus, you’re carrying it home.

Calories reduced.

Next comes cooking it. There’s no air fryer, microwave, or other shortcuts. It’s going to take a while to make. Want a snack whilst you’re waiting? Maybe some fruit; depending on what’s in season. Otherwise, tough.

Cleaning up afterwards? Elbow grease, soap, and water.

Fwoof again. More calories burnt.

For those working, your job was far more likely to involve a physical component (even past your commute), today – it’s highly likely that a lot of your job involves typing at a keyboard for vast swathes of time.

Simply put – participating in society used to burn more calories, on average, than it does now, and our intake of food used to be (again, on average) healthier than it is now.

Technology, at every turn, has lessened our need to burn calories simply to exist and increased our access to food rich with all of the tasty stuff in abundance (salt, fat, carbs, sugars; everything I constantly crave).

We’re not getting greedier, it’s that good health is now something we have to consciously choose, rather than being our default setting.

Obesity currently costs the UK approximately £98bn annually. We’re currently experiencing record-level child obesity in the UK. We’re seeing calls for ‘urgent action’ to deal with our massive consumption of junk food. Cheap, processed foods are everywhere, and we’re snacking on them increasingly often.

Now, there’s another side to this coin, right? Health isn’t just obesity, and I certainly know in which period I’d rather attend a hospital. I think it’s a very ill-thought-out take when people say that we need to return to simpler times – because a lot sucked about life back then and we made advances that’ve made life better for millions. That said, I do think that there are positive aspects to life in the past that we’ve lost.

A surface-level reading of the trendlines doesn’t look good. We’ve seen a surge in both our usage of technology and obesity rates in the last 100 years, and many suspect there to be a causal link between the two. We know that increased screen time correlates to increases in BMI and that our screentime as a nation is only trending up (there’s that pin from earlier).

We’re also seeing a potential ‘Hail Mary’ in the form of a massive uptake in weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, but they’re incredibly expensive, their effectiveness over prolonged periods aren’t fully understood and, in my opinion, are only dealing with the symptoms of the broader societal problem, rather than the cause.

So, is that it? Are we doomed to get fatter and less healthy forever and ever until we all look like the people from Wall-E?

Or should we all throw our phones into the sea and go back to typewriters and penny farthings?

Neither, and here’s why:

Technology isn’t linear. Computers don’t just get faster; people dream up new ways to use them. I remember watching a TedTalk about why no one would buy the iPad. It was too big, the speaker said ‘Most of the utility of a phone but with less of the portability. Less power than a laptop’ – there was no market for it, the speaker concluded, to thunderous applause.

Spoiler alert: he wasn’t right.

People tell me that the trend lines have only ever gone up, thus they’ll only ever continue to go up. I think that’s more indicative of the socioeconomic conditions that we’ve been living under, and I believe we’re headed towards a major paradigm-shift.

Words like ‘degrowth’ are trending. People are more health and climate conscious than ever. We’re keenly aware that our present systems are failing us and there’s a build-up of political will to invest in better systems and more robust policies to police the bad actors. A recent Ipsos poll found that a majority of people in Britain support imposing new taxes on companies producing junk and ultra-processed foods. We’ve already seen the first successes; the 2018 soft drinks sugar tax, which led to product reformulations and health benefits.

At the same time, we’re seeing the emergence of dozens of technologies that can be employed to benefit our health. AI can mine through huge reams of medical data far, far faster than humans can, identifying patterns and helping to develop drugs. Google’s DeepMind developed an AI for breast cancer analysis, outperforming human radiologists by 11.5%.

Virtual Reality and Augmented reality tech is helping to support surgeons, both in training and in-theatre performance. The ubiquity of Zoom and similar services is increasing the accessibility of healthcare to those living in remote or deprived regions.

These emerging technologies are often prohibitively expensive, with their usage far too limited to have any noticeable impact on public health across the board, but prices for emerging technology always start high, but as adoption rates increase and effectiveness is demonstrated – we inevitably see prices start to tumble. If a new drug or bit of tech can help our society be healthier – we want to see it in as many hands as possible.

Speaking of which, even my own humble smart watch got me thinking about my health. Examining my habits after my mammoth gaming session. Hell, I went on a long walk today purely based on trying to raise my heart rate in a healthier way. Until relatively recently – a portable fitness tracker would have been a luxury reserved for professional athletes or the very wealthy – now they’re commonplace and becoming more so (though still difficult to quite call them ‘cheap’). Because I had access to technology, I both understood my own health more, and took (literal) steps to improve it.

Our increasing obesity has been due to a complex web of interacting conditions and factors, and I think that the technology of tomorrow, motivated by our shifting cultural values – is tugging at every single thread.

‍