At 44, I’m starting to understand what’s meant by the old saying that aging is a battle against gravity. But it’s not just tummies, wrinkles, and joints that need more attention as we get older. Holistic health experts say it’s equally important to invest in social connections, lifelong learning, personal finances, spirituality, and other parts of our lives. Today GravityEight, a new startup in Marin County, CA, turned on the beta version of a website designed to help users make measurable progress across a range of these life priorities—eight of them, in fact.
At GravityEight, you can browse original articles and videos on the topics of relationships, careers, spirituality, community, learning, leisure, health, and finance. The more content you consume, the more “awareness credits” you build up. In a nifty bit of game mechanics, these credits eventually convert into virtual merit badges intended as fun rewards. But more important—and more fundamental to the GravityEight concept—are “action credits,” which you can only earn by getting off your duff and doing things in the real world.
The best example so far is visible in the health section of the site, which includes personalized dashboards that help users visualize the data from personal health-tracking devices such as the Nike+ run tracker, the Withings wireless body scale, and the Zeo sleep monitor. If you hit your weekly running goal, keep your weight under your desired threshold, or achieve enough quality sleep, GravityEight gives you action credits, which are more valuable than awareness credits and help boost your health score on the site’s overall “Wellbeing Meter.” That’s a pie-like graphic on the site’s front page, designed to summarize at a glance how your different kinds of wellbeing are balancing out (or not).
If it all sounds a little gimmicky, that’s because it is. Behavioral health experts are learning that just a little bit of positive feedback, even if it comes from a gadget or a website, can give people the motivation they need to persist with behavioral changes. Indeed, that’s one principle behind Nike+ and the whole wave of recent fitness- and health-monitoring devices, and it’s one of the foundations of the grassroots “quantified self” movement sweeping the nation’s geekier sections. (See Luke’s profile last May of Internet pioneer Larry Smarr’s experience as a quantified self. Months after this story, Smarr says he’s amazed at how many people still want him to talk publicly about this experience.)
Dave Wamsley, the force behind GravityEight and one of the founders of the Quantified Self Meetup group in Marin County, argues that “wellbeing is measurable” and says his hope is to create a fully integrated platform where consumers can, in a single view, monitor their quantitative progress across all of the key areas of their lives. If we don’t yet have the equivalent of Nike+ device for monitoring our financial, spiritual, or career progress, then it’s only a matter of time, at least from the quantified-self point of view.
Wamsley is a dot-com-era veteran who’s back for a second tour of duty in the Bay Area. The first began in the mid-1990s, when he founded and led AdAuction.com, an ad exchange acquired by Seattle-based Media Passage, and then started the San Francisco-based Internet incubator Campsix. “We raised $25 million and had a whole team in SoMa, and launched some very successful companies,” Wamsley recounts. “Then we hit that wall, the dot-com meltdown.”
After that, the Bay Area “was a dark, black place for several years.” Wamsley decamped to Tallahassee, FL, where he led K2 Urbancorp, owner of an eco-friendly town center development called Evening Rose that became home to some of the famous Katrina Cottages after the Gulf hurricane. But “starting companies is in my genes,” Wamsley says, and in 2009 or so he started to pay attention to the many wireless health-monitoring devices then coming onto the scene, such as
