Hu·man·i·ty
- the human race; human beings collectively.
- humaneness; benevolence.
- compassion, brotherly love, humaneness, kindness, kind-heartedness, consideration, understanding, sympathy, tolerance.
Rev·o·lu·tion
- a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or is organized or in people’s ideas about it.
There is no doubt for the past number of years we have been experiencing, what is termed as the “Information Revolution”. Just as the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions did in the past, the current Technology or Information Revolution has transformed our lives and humanity has progressed to a more advanced civilization as a result.
Or has it?
While it is true that technology has advanced us to a point where we can video conference from our backyards, work remotely with a virtual assistant anywhere on the planet and anything we want can be delivered right to our doorstep, technological progress brings with it a dark side. Technology companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on making their digital technology irresistible and “hooking” us in. Technology addiction is now recognized as a behavioral addiction and some parents have very serious concerns about the impact on their children’s development. Just as the Industrial Revolution removed the sense of family from people’s experience, it could be argued that the Information Revolution has disrupted the sense of shared humanity from our lives.
Enter the Digital Wellness Apps.
These are apps designed to improve your life and make you a better person, fueling the Humanity Revolution that we desperately need. Here are 5 apps designed for human well-being.
- Siempo is an app designed to help unaddict us from our smartphones. It reverses some of the psychologically addicting and persuasive techniques that are built into phone software. Some of the ways it does this is by unbranding app icons and turning them to grayscale and allowing you to configure your phone so that you receive alerts when you want and not every time you are notified. This is definitely fighting the ‘attention economy’ that can make people more distracted, lonely and depressed. Siempo is currently a leader in humane design and function.
- Habitica is a free habit-building productivity RPG (Role Playing Game) app that gives a fun incentive to completing tasks. You enter your daily tasks, habits and regular ToDos and your character is then rewarded for everything you complete and loses points for everything you don’t. You gain levels and rewards as you fight procrastination every day. A good illustration of how technology can make us better in our day to day lives in all kinds of ways.
- Pzizz is an advanced sleep and power nap app. It has been hailed as one of the best on the market and Pzizz themselves describe their technology as using psychoacoustics. It has also been clinically proven, in various studies, to help you sleep. Pzizz can also be used offline so you don’t need to have your phone connected to wifi (and be tempted to distraction) when you use it.
- Human is a free activity tracker that can log a wide range of activities such as walking, running, cycling. As well as a tracker, it uses rewards and levels to motivate you to meet your goals. It also uses passive location tracking to monitor your activities and build up your basic behaviors. We know that exercising is fundamental to health and well-being and this app helps draw attention to this aspect of your life in simple and helpful ways.
- Wecroak is an app to bring mindfulness around death and allow happiness to emerge by contemplating our own mortality. By sending daily quotes that can appear at any moment, randomly – just like death, this app reminds us of the vulnerability of life. Waking up to the truth about death allows us to live immediately and enjoyably, putting things into perspective and making sure that we communicate love to those around us. After all, life is short!
Eh Voila! We feel that these apps showcase some of smartphone technology at it’s best – supporting humanity and helping us to live our best lives. Of course this is only a partial list — there are many more projects being developed for the purpose of improving our technological health!
If you want to join the Humanity Technology Revolution, the Center for Humane Technology, created by Tristan Harris, a former Google exec, is a coalition attempting to “realign technology with humanity’s best interests”. Maybe humanity and technology will begin to work together to create a positive smart future for us all.
We would be really interested to know of any apps you currently use that you feel help support humanity, community and a positive life. Let us know on Twitter, or Facebook or LinkedIn and follow us to stay up to date with 100Ninjas!
Founder at 100Ninjas.
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