In the mid 1990s, a craze swept Japan and crested its way onto American shores: Kids were going crazy for the Tamagotchi, an egg-shaped digital pet. Every few hours, users would press a couple buttons to feed their Tamagotchi, play with it, or clean it up. The game was simple, but intensely rewarding. Users cried when their Tamagotchis got sick or died; they were elated when they were able to raise a healthy, happy pet. More than 70 million have been sold.

Thomas Goetz is the executive editor of Wired magazine and author of the new book *The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. As part of the reporting for the book, he had his genome scanned, was screened for more than a dozen diseases, and has tracked his sleep, blood pressure, weight, calories and oodles of other metrics. He holds a masters of public health from UC Berkeley.

*The genius of the device was that it was both simple and rewarding: It took just a few clicks a few times a day to keep your TamagotchisTamagotchi in good health. In other words, it rewarded vigilance over neglect, maintenance over obsessiveness (you could overfeed your Tamagotchi or smother it with too much love).

A decade later, there’s a new kind of Tamagotchi out there. And it's us.

New health-monitoring tools let us pay close attention to our state of being, how much exercise we're getting, how much sleep we're getting – and they make it easy to set a goal and improve ourselves. In other words, they turn our health into something of a game. And the reward is better health and a better life.

These devices are popping up everywhere: The FitBit is a paper-clip sized device that you can clip onto your belt to monitor cadence, calories and sleep. A genius little display shows a flower that grows the more you move, offering a brilliant bit of feedback. The Zeo sleep system uses a rigorous biometric brain analysis to measure overall sleep quality; you can also drill down into the numbers to ascertain how much time you're spending in light sleep versus deep sleep (the deeper the better). The BodyMedia Fit uses a combination of sensor technology to track cadence and calories, as well as respiration and heartrate. And the Philips DirectLife gizmo turns your data into a personal coaching kit that helps you adjust targets and meet goals.

In the best of these devices, the hardware is simple and unobtrusive, and the software is clean, engaging and easy to navigate through.

The key here is the feedback loop – making it possible for users to collect their own data, making it easy to understand, and then building that data into better decision making. Feedback has been recognized as an effective tool for behavior change since the 1960s. But the challenge is that collecting and organizing data has typically taken a lot of effort, making it something that works for only the most diligent of us.

But the key to these new tools is they make the gathering of personal data – what's called "data exhaust" – an automatic process that requires very little effort on our part. With cheaper sensors and better UI, personal data is becoming ubiquitous and malleable, turning this once academic notion of feedback into a business plan. What's more, sharing this data in social networks increases the utility of the data; it makes it easier for us to turn data into insight into action.

This is the premise behind the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Project HealthDesign, which has hit on the idea of "observations of daily life" – or ODLs – as a powerful catalyst for managing our health. And not just preventive health – Project HealthDesign is funding several projects that let people track ODLs to manage diseases from Crohn's to depression to underweight babies.

Another important element is play, the fact that tracking can be rewarding in and of itself, even fun. Clive Thompson has written about how Weight Watchers – which asks its members to turn their diets into a Points system for easier tracking – is in effect a big game. And HopeLab, an innovative medical research group, has used the principle to create Re-Mission, a videogame for teens with cancer where the kids play by engaging with their disease. A 2008 study in Pediatrics showed that Re-Mission significantly improved outcomes in kids who played the game.

There are, of course, pioneers in this sort of thing – first and foremost diabetics, who've been compelled to rigorously self-monitor their blood glucose and insulin levels for decades. In the past, though, self-monitoring has been seen as a burden for people with diabetes – the tools have been bulky, the interfaces stodgy and medicalized, and the result is lack of engagement.

With millions more people being diagnosed with diabetes each year though, there's a great incentive to create better, smarter and easier tools for self-monitoring – as well as find ways to make diabetics more at ease with the idea of constant self-monitoring. Bayer Healthcare recently worked with Nintendo to develop the Didget meter, a game for children with diabetes that rewards them with points for keeping their blood glucose levels within a personalized target range. The game is designed for kids as young as 5 years old.

The key here seems to be the notion of control (or to use the academic term, self-efficacy) – self-monitoring can give us a way to participate in our health. And turning it into something fun, something that we can play with and improve upon – that can give us not only a role but an authority. We can take control of our health. And we can play to win.

Image: _jennieMarie/flickr, Alexis Madrigal/Wired.com

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