Is This Device That Stores a Heartbeat an Authentic Way to Memorialize Someone?

Platforms like Facebook already act as mediums between the living and deceased.

The first time I saw an ad for Enso, a new gadget with the tagline “Keep the heartbeat of someone you love . . . forever,” I wondered, who would want this? Who would want to capture in a handheld egg the pulse of someone whose blood is no longer pumping?

The Enso is an app-gadget combo which allows a person to record their heartbeat by holding the pebble-like egg for ten seconds, after which the app and egg will store the pulse. Theoretically, the gadget can hold a heartbeat forever. The concept, of course, capitalizes on the human desire for continued connection with those we love, even after they have passed, and does so by branding the heartbeat as unique. As companies access more information about us, will they also be able to help us connect with the dead in more satisfying ways? Will gadgets like the Enso become the new photographs and urns?

When a relative passes away, my grandmother removes all pictures of them from her photo albums. The photos make her uneasy, she says. And before seeing the Enso, this is a feeling that baffled me. But as technology progresses and we are able to segment and sustain aspects of human life in more creative ways, I find myself in my grandmother’s shoes—made uneasy by the variety of ways in which we can remember people and moments.

Technology has already trickled into the way we memorialize the dead, with platforms like Facebook acting as mediums between the living and deceased. According to the 2013 study Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning published by the University of California in Irvine, Facebook leads to the prolonging of death experiences. Unlike shrines, memorials, and graves, Facebook pages were created by the deceased themselves, and people interact with the page as if the person is alive. The study refers to post-mortem profiles as “interactive digital tombstones.” What was once a living profile is adapted to the needs of survivors.

Interactions with post-mortem pages add a layer of socialization with the dead that wasn’t available to past generations. More than half of active Facebook users log on to Facebook daily, so, unlike stored mementos, Facebook functions as a medium for weaving death into everyday life. “Social networking services create an infrastructure for a new relationship with our social pasts—one in which failed romances, past embarrassments, but also deceased friends are resituated into our everyday use of social networking services,” the study says.

But these “interactive digital tombstones” don’t make me as uneasy as a gadget specifically designed to memorialize the dead. A person has a connection to their Facebook, but do you really have a connection to your heartbeat? If someone played a tape and told me it was my mother’s heartbeat, I would have no idea whether it was or not. It’s not a recording of her voice or a picture of her face. And perhaps that’s the most unsettling part of the Enso—it tries to turn a biological trace into an object of sentiment, rendering it a gimmick of grief.

In the 2017 University of Washington study Understanding Practices Surrounding Childhood Mementos to Inform the Design of Interactive Technology and Sentimental Record-Keeping, experts interviewed parents about why they kept childhood mementos and how they stored them. When I interview one of the authors of the study, Katie Derthick, she makes a comment that I think is applicable here. She explains that mixing technology with memento-keeping doesn’t take away, but adds another layer to how we’ll be able to experience memories. “It’s a different dimension of connection,” she says. “If you look at a picture, you get to see their face. When you have ashes you get to have something in your physical space that is them. When you have, for example, this heartbeat egg in your hand, you get to connect to a different instrument. If you could represent a person as a symphony, you have the violin, piano, heartbeat, urn.”

In the end, the perception of an additional connection may not be as eerie as the reality that a company is profiting off a connection that may not exist. As technology is developed to mimic sentiment, companies are going to find ways to sell it.

And in a society where people fear death as much as they love branding, I think the Enso will sell. Thoreau once wrote that “when our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object,” and is there anything more horrifying than thinking this object is going to be manufactured by a tech startup? As technology is able to capture more human senses, so will our perceptions change of how much life can go into a gadget before it becomes an inauthentic way to memorialize someone.