probably a very interesting approach to track and collect fundamental body data of our pilots:

---health monitoring tools get popular (and cheap)---

www.wired.com article mentioning products (listed at the end of this post)

another another wired article about the topic:
excerpt:
"...Self-trackers seem eager to contribute to our knowledge about human life. The world is full of potential experiments: people experiencing some change in their lives, going on or off a diet, kicking an old habit, making a vow or a promise, going on vacation, switching from incandescent to fluorescent lighting, getting into a fight. These are potential experiments, not real experiments, because typically no data is collected and no hypotheses are formed. But with the abundance of self-tracking tools now on offer, everyday changes can become the material of careful study.

When magnifying lenses were invented, they were aimed at the cosmos. But almost immediately we turned them around and aimed them at ourselves. The telescope became a microscope. We discovered blood cells. We discovered spermatozoa. We discovered the universe of microorganisms inside ourselves. The accessible tools of self-tracking and numerical analysis offer a new kind of microscope with which to find patterns in the smallest unit of sociological analysis, the individual human. But the notion of a personal microscope isn't quite right, because insight will come not just from our own numbers but from combining them with the findings of others. Really, what we're building is what climate scientist Jesse Ausubel calls a macroscope.

The basic idea of a macroscope is to link myriad bits of natural data into a larger, readable pattern. This means computers on one side and distributed data-gathering on the other. If you want to see the climate, you gather your data with hyperlocal weather stations maintained by amateurs. If you want to see traffic, you collect info from automatic sensors placed on roadways and cars. If you want new insights into yourself, you harness the power of countless observations of small incidents of change—incidents that used to vanish without a trace. And if you want to test an idea about human nature in general, you aggregate those sets of individual observations into a population study.

The macroscope will be to our era of science what the telescope and the microscope were to earlier ones. Its power will be felt even more from the new questions it provokes than from the answers it delivers. The excitement in the self-tracking movement right now comes not just from the lure of learning things from one's own numbers but also from the promise of contributing to a new type of knowledge, using this tool we all build..."

(self)tracking products:

sleeptracker: $179

fitbit / a clip that transfers activity data to computer
"Did I get enough exercise today? How many calories did I burn? Am I getting good rest?"
    for $99

zeo sleep phase tracker: for $350 (including sleep phase alarm clock system!?)

tracking your babies data: Rich, informative charts and striking visualizations provide insight to your amazing baby's needs and daily rhythms. Share your site online so that parents, family, nannies and caregivers can stay connected with each other. 

AXBO - SLEEP PHASE ALARM CLOCK (schlafphasenwecker) costs 179euro

link to an americanscientist.org article from Kurt D. Bollacker
thanks jwildeboer for twittering

"Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information

...When I was a boy, I discovered a magnetic reel-to-reel audio tape recorder that my father had used to create “audio letters” to my mother while he was serving in the Vietnam War. To my delight (and his horror), I could listen to many of the old tapes he had made a decade before. Even better, I could make recordings myself and listen to them. However, all of my father’s tapes were decaying to some degree—flaking, stretching and breaking when played. It was clear that these tapes would not last forever, so I copied a few of them to new cassette tapes. While playing back the cassettes, I noticed that some of the sound quality was lost in the copying process. I wondered how many times I could make a copy before there was nothing left but a murky hiss..." read the article

to get an impression of how art will be "consumed" in the future check out this youtube video that lev manovich sent me tonight while i was searching for references to his ideas about the post-compression-age.

BTW: The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UCSD in San Diego (where etoy built its first TANK in 1998) is involved in this studies.