Monetizing

by Richard Gay

I’ve griped about monetizing before, saying “Stop monetizing everything!” Now that I’m closer to zero dollars than before, now I wonder if it is possible to monetize one’s every waking moment, even one’s every moment. My god, you say, even your sleep? And I say, yes, even your sleep. Of course, one way to do that is to post blogs to a site which you monetize, and have that traffic or those ad clicks generate income for you. But I’m thinking of something different. Can I monetize my sleep data? Can I monetize everyone’s sleep data? Can I make an internet not of things, but of people? A simple piece of connectible hardware with sensors feeding data to a database engine could gather anonymized sleep data that is useful for medical purposes. I realize there are already sleep apps available on smartphones, and maybe that is the place to start, as a smartphone app. But more information might be better; one’s motion isn’t all that is of interest. Pulse rate, respiration rate, temperature, brain activity, eye activity — all the stuff that sleep labs collect are of interest. That might take more hardware than a smartphone, or maybe peripheral hardware that runs on batteries and communicates by bluetooth. How much hardware does this take? How much code?