If Apple is going Fitbit and the iWatch is coming to the market in October, it will allow wearers another way to measure sleep activity, calorie consumption, blood oxygen levels and other vital statistics, another opportunity to quantify themselves at high levels, to understand behavior patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. It will also tacitly permit corporations and (likely) government to obtain such personal information. But Chris Dancy is already living in that space. The opening of Ira Boudway’s Bloomberg Businessweek piece about him:

“Ask Chris Dancy what he ate on Aug. 11 of last year, and he can tell you (Chick-fil-A). He can also tell you about the weather that day (83F), what music he listened to (Kelly Clarkson’s Walk Away), how many e-mails he sent (21), how long he slept (8 hours and 35 minutes), how many steps he took (8,088), and when he took his dogs to the park (1:04 p.m.). Dancy, 45, doesn’t have an amazing memory. He’s an extreme life hacker: He collects information about himself and his surroundings from 10 devices he wears or carries and 13 more in his home and car. He also catalogs virtually all of his online activity. The exhaustive record-keeping is an effort to discover the systems that shape his behavior so he can tinker with them and live better.

Dancy’s project began five years ago when he started archiving his tweets. Twitter (TWTR) didn’t make them searchable at the time, and Dancy wanted to collect them as a kind of diary. He also started dumping his Facebook (FB) posts and status updates into spreadsheets. ‘Then it just became a domino effect,’ he says. He began using any device he thought would help him find his quantified self.”