Bits: Happy Birth Data! A New App Tracks Fertility

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Covering Up Your Amazon Tracks

Can I erase things I recently looked at on Amazon.com so they don’t show up on the home page when I return?

You can remove certain products from your Amazon shopping trail, or turn off your browsing history on the site altogether. To remove specific items from the Recently Viewed section when you are logged into your Amazon page, click the “View or edit your browsing history” link under a row of products. On the resulting “Your Browsing History” page, find the product you want to remove and click the “Delete this item” link.

In the “Manage Your Browsing History” box on the left side of the page, you also have options to delete all the items on list at once or turn off your browsing history completely. You can also get to your browsing history settings by clicking the Your Account button at the top of the Amazon page and scrolling down to the Personalization section.

Bits: Nike FuelBand Tracks Physical Activity Inconsistently

My latest fixation wasn’t an ersatz animal. It was the Nike FuelBand, a slim, black bracelet that has the mission of tracking the daily physical activity of anyone who wears it.

From the moment I wrapped the band around my wrist, I was enamored with the idea of a device that could help me collect data about my habits and behavior, so that I could try to improve them. The only trouble was that the device didn’t seem to work very well.

The FuelBand, which awards virtual points for various forms of exercise, doled out rewards with little apparent rationale. One lazy Sunday, I lounged around my apartment with my iPad and an endless pot of coffee, barely moving. But the band delivered a cheery message: I’d hit my goal for the day. Huh?

Others have noticed this inconsistency, too. Casey Chan, a writer at Gizmodo, found that the band awarded more points for eating a slice of pizza than for walking up a flight of stairs.

Joseph Teegardin, a Nike spokesman, said last week that the company assigned points to a range of behaviors. To tally those points, the accelerometers in the wristband monitor activity and match movement patterns to a Nike proprietary index. He added that the device worked best with activities involving wrist movement — dancing and basketball, for example.

The device’s inconsistency was frustrating. After a few days, though, I forgot about my newfound pet altogether, leaving it in a public restroom and then, after retrieving it, putting it in my back pocket and later accidentally sitting on it. Until then, the wristband had certainly been affecting my behavior. I felt Fuelshamed, embarrassed each time I glanced at the band’s dull surface and found it illuminated by a lonely red dot, a signal that I wasn’t active enough to appease the machine.

The FuelBand is part of a new, ambitious breed of fitness tracking devices and apps that promise to transform their owners into personal data collectors, able to analyze and improve the minutiae of their daily lives — where they go, what they eat and how much they move.

These gadgets and software have attracted legions of fans who want to know how far they run on a jog or how many calories they burn on their way to work. The FuelBand, however, is trying to move into new territory by creating its own index for awarding points, called NikeFuel, based on a variety of activities and then calculating a daily total. It’s meant to give its users a generic goal, but it can also lead to confusion, given the ambiguity of the metrics.

THE forgetfulness and guilt I experienced as my FuelBand honeymoon wore off is not uncommon, according to people who study behavioral science. The collected data is often interesting, but it is hard to analyze and use in a way that spurs change.

“It doesn’t trigger you to do anything habitually,” said Michael Kim, who runs Kairos Labs, a Seattle-based company specializing in designing social software to influence behavior. “Habits are based on cues that happen every day, which leads to a routine and then a reward or achievement, which could just be something as general as an endorphin rush.”

Of the FuelBand, he said, “You just see a pretty number that isn’t always enough to be a trigger.” The FuelBand connects with smartphones and a Web-based interface, which shows users a cute animation of a dancing alien as a reward for reaching a goal. But Mr. Kim, whose résumé includes a stint as director of Xbox Live, the online gaming system created by Microsoft, said the gamelike mechanisms of the Nike device and others like it were “not enough” for the average user. “Points and badges do not lead to behavior change,” he said.

The FuelBand and its counterparts also allow users to announce their achievements on various social networks. But frequent updates could annoy the friends who see them. “Does anyone really want to see how many miles you ran, what you weigh, along with what the weather is where you are and the songs you’re listening to?” said B. J. Fogg, who directs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford and has conducted research tests with the FuelBand and other forms of wearable technology.

But Mr. Fogg said he believed that the FuelBand might be useful in another way. Simply donning it can work as a fancier version of a string tied around your finger: a reminder to complete a task or errand, he said. It could be the nudge you need, for example, to get off the subway a few stops early and walk the rest of the way home, or to jog a few extra laps around the track.

“You aren’t going to be any less active than you already are by wearing it,” he said.

But its benefits, such as they are, may not be sustainable. “The biggest problem people have is losing the device,” Mr. Fogg said with a laugh. “Is it reasonable to expect someone to wear it every day for the rest of their life?”

It isn’t for me. My once-beloved FuelBand now lives on a crowded dresser, surrounded by jewelry I’ve grown tired of wearing.

Of course, these monitoring devices could be miniaturized further, and could develop more impressive capabilities. Steven Dean, who organizes gatherings in New York for self-trackers — people who collect data about everything from their caffeine intake to their number of smiles — said we were in the early stages of information gathering and analysis. He compared it to documenting a rash on his skin, photographing it and keeping a record of its response to various allergy creams.

“I may not know what to make of the information I’ve collected, but at least I have it,” Mr. Dean said. “I could show the dermatologist what I looked like two weeks ago rather than guess.”

EVENTUALLY, wearable devices will help people understand more of their bodies’ behaviors and find ways to tweak them. Already, personal data streams can be exported to smartphones or computers for use in digital weight scales and heart and blood-sugar monitors. Future devices could nudge their owners in real time, letting them know if they were near a gym and hadn’t worked out in a few days. Or they could warn diabetes patients to stay away from ice cream shops.

“This is just the start in terms of pure data capture,” Mr. Dean said.

TiVo to Buy TRA, Which Tracks Buying Habits of TV Viewers

Though the deal is modest compared with most recent media deals — TiVo will spend about $20 million to buy out other investors in TRA — the prospects for the television industry are considerable, said Tom Rogers, the president of TiVo.

“We believe television is at an inflection point,” Mr. Rogers said. “In the digital realm you measure click by click and get increasingly granular information. This kind of metric has not developed well in the television space before now.”

That metric makes it possible for advertisers to tell which networks are most effective at selling beer or cookies, and even which specific television shows are best at selling specific cars. TRA acquires this data by collecting information from 1.5 million set-top cable boxes and matching the viewers (anonymously) with information gleaned from “loyalty cards” presented at supermarkets, as well as with other measurements, like car-registration information.

TRA has signed numerous clients in its five years of existence, including 27 cable and broadcast networks and 45 different advertising brands. Some, including Mars candy bars and Kraft’s Oscar Mayer brand, have offered testimonials to the effectiveness of the information gathered by TRA.

CBS, an early client, has been especially supportive. That network’s chief research officer, David F. Poltrack, praised the acquisition Monday, citing the effectiveness of TRA data in demonstrating increased accountability in television advertising.

CBS has long fought the 50-year-old system of ad-selling on television, which is almost entirely based on the demographic performance of specific shows: success among viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 remains the gold standard of television.

The network, although now competitive in that 18-49 age measure, historically has fared less well in that group. In past years, CBS has argued that it is more important to determine whether a show is generating sales for advertisers than whether it simply has a large group of younger people watching.

Mark Lieberman, the chairman of TRA (he will continue in that role after the acquisition), pointed to one study the company did based on sales of shampoo. Four cable networks were measured. One, MTV, had by far the biggest sales to shampoo advertisers, based on its young audience. But a cable network with a much older audience, TNT, had more than twice as many shampoo-buyers watching its shows.

Plans for extensive expansion of TRA’s operations will be enhanced, Mr. Lieberman said, by the alliance with TiVo, which has a large store of capital — as much as $600 million, Mr. Rogers noted, from patent litigation based on its original invention of the digital video recorder.

Both Mr. Rogers and Mr. Lieberman described the TRA data as complementary to the traditional Nielsen ratings. But Mr. Rogers pointed to the potential to go far beyond that basic information for advertisers and networks.

“It gets away from the assumption of what broad demographics do and brings it down to the reality of what actual people do,” Mr. Rogers said.