https://dereferer.me/?https://www.aaofoundation.net/common/pages/UserFile.aspx?fileId=1180894Ok, I am old, I understand that. What I will never understand is how overly attached society has become to their phones. These days if you tell someone they must have either their heart or their phone removed they would have to think about it. I was surprised last week when a college student I was interviewing for a volunteer position had a flip phone. I asked her about it thinking she was being trendy or trying to be old school.
She told me that she had a problem with other people tracking her smartphone. "You were hacked?" "Yeah, by my mother, because I wore braces." And she started laughing. I had to ask more.
This was only 6 years ago. Her orthodontist loved high tech toys and was using this system. She said the ortho sold all of the good things like the smartphone app with daily reminders to wear the headgear, daily requests to fill in the calendar, daily reminders to brush and take care of the braces and an ongoing and constant monitoring of real time wear time. The app could tell if she was wearing it.
It has been over 50 years since my adolescent experience with braces and headgear. I still remember the ongoing battle to wear it an average of 14 hours a day under the watchful eyes of my parents and the ortho. They were in favor of me just leaving it on all the time. If you read the article you see that the average wear time, even with monitoring, was only between 6 and seven hours a day. Even then they only averaged wearing it 5 days a week.
Elise told me the problem was she could ignore the app's constant reminders and she could have filled in the calendar month on the same day to come close to her actual wear time, which was recorded and transmitted automatically. The problem was her mother got the app too. That mean her mother could see if she had it on in real time, every 15 minutes and she was supposed to wear it 12 hours a day.
At the beginning that was not a problem for her. She was 13 and in the middle of 8th grade when the braces and headgear went on and she was home most of the time. When she started high school things became more difficult and stayed that way until her junior year. Any time the app did not register the full 12 hours her mother would go into the calendar and add a note that she owed howevermany hours/minutes that weekend. If Elise wanted to go out at night she needed to wear it during the day. Speaking from experience when I left the house I would take it off whenever possible. Elise tried that but her mother would look at the app and call her saying she was supposed to be wearing it. So she would not leave the house with it on1` and that suited her mother just fine, she could do homework.
After two years of that Elise decided the phone was not worth the invasion of privacy. She made a point of saying it was not just the headgear app, she got tired of everything revolving around the phone and how she was serving it, not the other way around.
