Then I met two impressive colleagues that shared this vision for bringing connected health into the living room, namely Carol Colman, an accomplished author specializing in the self-help genre, and Justin Mager, personal trainer turned physician and expert in lifestyle interventions. Soon we were joined by media relations maven extraordinaire, Gina Cella and Wellocracy was born. Along the way, we picked up some awesome advisers, including Andy Donner, James Fowler, Emily Hackel, David Rose and Charlotte Yeh.

How will we achieve our goal to motivate individuals to move to a healthier state? We start with the premise that the self-tracking market is crowded, confusing and oriented toward techies. We will simplify the language and drive home the value through a series of books (short ebooks to be followed by a traditional book later). These books will be tightly coupled to a website where we can build community around Wellocracy and continue to update our members' knowledge about the fast changing field of self-tracking and behavior change.

We're excited to have the opportunity to launch our first ebook and our website at the Consumer Electronics Show, Jan. 8, 2013. There, at the Silvers Summit, I'll have the pleasure of moderating a panel on health apps for the 50+ crowd. I hope we see you there. In the meantime, we're looking for early adopters to join the Wellocracy community and share their own stories about how the combination of self-tracking, motivational tools and steps and bursts can lead to improved health. I'm excited to be working with Carol, Justin, Gina and our advisers as we launch this effort to improve the health of our nation. More to come on Wellocracy, as we ready for the official launch in January...

Joseph C. Kvedar, MD, is the founder and director of the Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare in Boston. He can be reached at jkvedar@partners.org. His commentary first appeared on The cHealth Blog.