Technology has revolutionized what we can measure about ourselves. But is all that tracking good for our health?

WHEN LISA Betts-LaCroix was having her first child, a home birth, her husband was not always by her side. He would watch her intensely when she’d have a contraction, then dart off to log the information about that contraction on an Excel spreadsheet. He wasn’t doing this for medical reasons. He was doing it for eternity.

This year, Betts-LaCroix returned the favor by creating a program to quantify her and her husband’s relationship. After reading the bookHis Needs, Her Needs, she decided that certain things contributed to a positive relationship and other things eroded a marriage. The guiding concept for her study was a bank account: year after year, each partner makes “deposits” into a marriage—kindnesses, generous acts—and if they acted selfishly or cruelly they were making equivalent “withdrawals” from their joint account. These withdrawals included negative things she or her husband did or said. If he acted out, he’d get a “negative three,” as she put it. If she picked a fight, he would take away points from her side of the ledger. If she cooked him dinner, she’d get a plus number. She charted the two of them for months, measuring their progress.

Betts-LaCroix is no computer scientist. She’s a 48-year-old actress, originally from Toronto, who educates her two children at home in the Bay Area. She wryly described herself as “a totally disorganized person enamored with the idea of being organized.” She and her husband call themselves self-quantifiers, part of the Quantified Self movement. It’s a movement that took off afterWired magazine editors Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf originally coined the term, in 2008, to describe the myriad attempts to “hack the self” for optimum living and founded the movement.

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