Health Tech's 'Vitruvian Man'

The original perfect body was conceived of by ancient Roman author Vitruvius, who created the concept of the "Vitruvian Man" in his treatise De architectura around 15 BC. Expanded on in art by Leonardo da Vinci, the Vitruvian Man was "ideally" proportioned (even if he reportedly had a hernia): a symmetrical body eight heads high, fitting neatly within both a circle and a square.

Today in the App Store or Google Play store, a search for the term "perfect body" yields hundreds of results. Most feature glistening, taut, gym-honed, oiled-up, Magic Mike-worthy abdominals as their featured image. Many are high-grossing. Others are free, but used as promotional tools for wearables and diets. All fall within the "health and fitness" category, the domain where today's answer to the Vitruvian Man is forged limb by limb.

The Vitruvian Man appears in branding today as a symbol of health, but his creator Vitruvius was not a physician: he was an architect and civil engineer. The original Vitruvian Man acted as a microcosm of the universe itself, corresponding with the quote attributed to Da Vinci that "man is the model of the world." The figure indicated the body's harmony with nature, intended to inform architectural practise.

It would follow that today's ideal body should inform the technology it inspires. As the buildings of ancient Rome reflected the physicality of their inhabitants, so new technologies—computers, phones, and the software they support—should echo a modern "ideal" or "normal" body.

But today this relationship has reversed itself, with technology influencing the body instead. Health and fitness apps have created a new physical ideal based on aggregated performance levels. The result is a new, everyman "Vitruvian Man," composed of averages recorded by devices. When technology is his world, man becomes the model of technology.

If we were to meet this new, quasi-cyborg model of perfection, not so much implanted with technology as sculpted in its image, what would he look like? (Or she: Vitruvius's model was male by default, but surely the future of cyborg bodies will favour women.)

If you were to follow the guidance of top-grossing health and fitness apps, matching their leaderboard scores and following their advice to the letter, what would your crowdsourced physique look like? Would the new Vitruvian hyper-body be a superhero, or a bland composite?

Let's take a look at health and fitness app charts. Firstly, our Vitruvian Man will clearly be very good at running: At time of writing the "Couch to 5k" running app is number one in the App Store and second place in Google Play. The ever-popular "Zombies, Run!", an audio app which narrates a story about being chased by the undead, even offers training for our model's post-apocalyptic future.

But despite the zombies, the new Vitruvian Man is calm and collected: "The Mindfulness App", comprising guided breathing exercises and meditations, ranks in both top tens. As per Silicon Valley's satire on the tech world's hatred of smoking, our cyborg will also avoid nicotine: an Android app called "QuitNow!-PRO" matches the equally popular "My Last Cigarette" for iOS, its doomy UX featuring little pictures of skulls and cigarettes alongside motivational phrases like "Smoking causes tooth loss."

And of course the new Vitruvian Man or Woman will be fertile, and obsessed with producing Vitruvian children. A baby calendar app called "The Wonder Weeks" ranks highly in Google Play and the App Store, famously free of sex-related content but rich in apps for raising babies.

Today's Vitruvian Man will naturally use technology to track and evaluate everything he consumes: Food diaries are an app store mainstay, fusing the tracking habits of the Quantified Self movement with the ruthless, some would say neurotic, daily practises of the latter-day diet industry. These diet apps are the inheritors to a system described as the original Quantified Self: Weight Watchers, founded in 1961, gave its followers an alternative to calorie-counting by gamifying meals as a system of Points-scoring.

Weight Watchers' weekly meetings also share with health tech a social dimension. A study conducted in 2011 (albeit funded by the diet group) showed that those who attempted weight loss in a group lost more than twice as much as those going it alone: the perfected Vitruvian body, it would seem, is one built on peer support.

Social fitness apps, where users often share their results and compete against their peers, function similarly. The leaderboard mechanic has been co-opted into the fitness industry through popular apps like Fitbit and Nike+ Running. A new sports app, "Sports Buddy," even encourages you to review other people based on their athletic performance.

The goals set by your friends and competitors create the Vitruvian boy-next-door: he is better than you, yet the same as you. He outran zombies on Monday then cycled three more kilometres than you did on Tuesday. He is people-pleasing, wary of criticism, and studiously, meticulously normal.

But the problem with an algorithmic vision of the ideal is that it allows little room for deviation, and overlooks individual needs. One measurement which shows up in hundreds of health apps is the BMI, or Body Mass Index. Devised in the 19th century by Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet, it assumes a calculation of body fat, and gained popularity in affluent Western societies just as obesity became a prominent social issue (along with, later, eating disorders).

Quetelet also set out to define the "normal man" with his index, but it was intended as a tool for examining populations rather than individual bodies. And yet this is the purpose the BMI is put to today, both in self-diagnostic tools and in the doctor's surgery. Despite constant accusations of inaccuracy, its speed and simplicity allows the BMI's misuse to endure, moving this particular ideal further from reality.

And technology, famously, is not neutral: the "average" we hold as a goal can be skewed by issues of access, affluence and physical ability. "All tracking is mediated tracking," technology theorist Jenny Davis writes of health-tracking and its implications for identity, "as the self who tracks is a mediated self."

Should we trust our bodies to this kind of mediated ideal? Are we building a new Vitruvian Man, or health tech's Frankenstein's monster?

Modern Medicine is a series on Motherboard about how health care and medical technology can move forward so rapidly while still being stuck in the past. Follow along here.