Where are Wearables?
Building on the previous post:
The need for wearable technology:
→ Our environment is evolving faster than our brain. In the developed nations unhealthy fast food is plentiful. The intelligence which should have evolved in our brain must be moved to the technology we wear to counterbalance this effect. ←
Wearable tech can measure and visually show how damaging overeating, lack of quality sleep and lack of exercise are to our health.
“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually too improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” — H. James Harrington
Jawbone — “Know Yourself & Live Better”
This is the promise of wearable technology, but it has been a very hard journey.
Many early wearable companies had the same faith as Jawbone.
Wearables maker Jawbone’s liquidation also makes it the highest-funded failure by any consumer electronics startup in history. The wearables company, which saw at least 16 separate financing rounds over the company’s 17 years in existence. The company raked in $929.9M in disclosed funding, making it one of the most well-funded companies ever to fold. Jawbone ranks as the second costliest startup death or asset sale ever by a VC-funded company globally since at least 2009, as well as the most expensive failure by any consumer electronics startup— CB Insights data
Below is a slide from my wearable talk in 2018. The list of failed wearable companies was four slides long. Things looked dark as most wearable companies were leaving the field after losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Early wearable companies big and small had a difficult time.
Nike had gone through this process of creating consumer electronics gadgets and things that were maybe not central to its original core. You could argue maybe that was a great innovation experience. You could argue that we maybe lost our way a little bit. You could maybe argue that that wasn’t authentic to who we were. But it left us with a bit of a hangover, me included — Jordan Rice, senior director of Nike NXT Smart Systems Engineering
We are now hopefully past the early failures/hype and moving to the golden age.
The coming golden age of wearable technology.
The Apple watch shows the promise of wearables as both profitable and valuable. iWatch saves lives
Your Medical Doctor is Ringing
Your phone coupled with a wearable will know more about your health than your doctor. How? Let's just look at the smartphone/wearable sensors and how they can read physiological data.
Wearable/Phone Sensors:: Soli radar (Android), LiDAR (iOS), Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Magnetometer, GPS, Biometric sensors, barometer, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor and high resolution camera. Both Android and iOS have machine learning hardware accelerated chips.
We know many important physiological signals are possible to read from noninvasive scanning.
As pointed out in the paper below, having our phones with us 24/7 provides a detailed continuous view of our mental & physical health
In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research and developments in smartphone-sensor based healthcare technologies. Smartphone Sensors for Health Monitoring and Diagnosis
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6539461/
In the future we will only make hospital visits when our wearable device has identified a problem. This is the promise of machine learning, big data and wearable devices.
The future of wearables looks amazing.
Your Life Coach is Ringing
Article coming soon.
Your Psychologists is Ringing
Article coming soon.
