Your Smart Home Will See You Now

22

October

2016

5/5 (2)

The healthcare industry, like many others, has seen unprecedented disruption enabled by mobile, wireless, sensor, robotic, and other digital technologies. Trends have been moving towards personalized drugs and treatment, automated healthcare, medical record mining using artificial intelligence, robots in assisting repetitive jobs, and computerized consultations with virtual health assistants (see sense.ly) (Medical Futurist, 2016a). Sensors in particular, have played a vital role in shaping the future of healthcare service delivery: many of you may already use your smartphone or a health- or fitness-tracker. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and professor of genomics at Scripps Research Institute, describes this trend as “heading towards being able to do your own medical selfie” (Byrnes, 2016).

 

But beyond self-help lies potential not in self-diagnosis, but in computer-diagnosis: i.e. machines that can sense your health, analzye it in reference to databases, and think for themselves in detecting abnormalities. These new technologies have potentially revolutionary consequences for healthcare (Manthorpe, 2016), and as CEO of Babylon frames it, “the only way to solve the expensive supply-and-demand issues of health services is to leverage artificial intelligence.” In fact, patients may even see rising accuracy in diagnosis, something Manthorpe (2016) attributes to machine-learning systems’ ability to find patterns in databases that are too large and compex for human brains to comprehend.

 

One such example of an increase in diagnostic precision and accuracy that is to come, is a smart home that is technologically enabled to notice when something is up. The Medical Futurist (2016b) depicts the following scenario: A woman is feeling under the weather and blames it on stress at work; her house knows better: her sleep tracker mattress is showing signs of abnormal sleeping patterns, the microchip in her toilet is detecting elevated lab markers in her urine, the digital mirror has noticed darkening circles under her eyes. Her home serves as a smart intermediary between her and her doctor, and can, in fact, send messages to the doctor when symptons are appearing and things aren’t adding up. This woman’s doctor can then contact their patient to recommend an appointment. To think further ahead into the future of artificial intelligence, there might not be the need for an appointment, and one could interact directly with their virtual doctor.

 

As sensors become more powerful and affordable (Medical Futurist, 2016b), said scenario doesn’t lie far ahead. Think of the far-reaching implications of your home, in which you spend a considerable amount of time, in the very least to dress, sleep, shower, eat, possessing capabilities pertaining to detecting your body’s warnings before you do. A doctor’s time may be put to more efficient use, illnesses may be detected early, an aging population may spend longer in the comfort of their homes – in fact, they may even be safer “in the hands” of their home than in a nursing home. Particulary for the elderly (an increasing age group that many economies are struggling to adequately accommodate), a move away from wearable devices requiring ease-of-use with bluetooth and other mobile technologies, a huge potential in smart home sensors lies in the automation of the data-collection: such sensors do not require the user’s attention (Medical Futurist, 2016b).

 

There are of course challenges that lie ahead in implementing such healthcare solutions. One that has critical importance in sensorized healthcare is data: your smart home will be collecting your most personal data about your health in order to process and analyze it using algorithms. Eric Topol highlights the disappointment of data security measures within medical data and the resulting patient vulnerability (Byrnes, 2016): “our medical data is being sold, hacked and breached…[in addition], people don’t own their medical data…they are generating an ever increasing amount of data and there’s no home for that data.” No disruption is without its challenges, and that of data protection and security is far-reaching across many industry boundaries. But it also means that as the economy as a whole moves towards better practices for data security enforced by regulation, the benefits of technology-enabled healthcare services largely outweigh the challenges.

 

References:

Byrnes, N., 2016. The Evangelist of Individualized Medicine. Technology Review [online]. Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601847/the-evangelist-of-individualized-medicine/

Manthorpe, R., 2016. Artificial Intelligence could bring speed and awareness to healthcare. Raconteur [online]. Available at: http://raconteur.net/healthcare/artificial-intelligence-could-bring-speed-and-awareness-to-healthcare

Medical Futurist, 2016a. Artificial Intelligence will redesign healthcare. Medical Futurist [online]. Available at: http://medicalfuturist.com/artificial-intelligence-will-redesign-healthcare/

Medical Futurist, 2016b. Healthcare is coming home with sensors and algorithms. Medical Futurist [online]. Available at: http://medicalfuturist.com/healthcare-is-coming-home/

Please rate this

Like Toy Story, But Better: How Nike has Brought Communities and Shoes to Life

27

September

2016

No ratings yet.

 

 

What do sport apparel and digital innovation have in common? Probably more than you think.

Nike has gotten into the habit of introducing more than just “new seasonal colors” when they announce a new product line. It’s not that they don’t get fitness apparel right (I don’t think anyone has ever looked bad in Nike), it’s just that year after year, they bring their stylish gear to life and compliment it with really cool stuff (By the way, they actually have a position called “Footware Innovation Vice President”): first it was Fuel, then it was Nike+, then they introduced digital knitting and 3D printing athletes’ shoes, and now they’ve succeeded in bringing back the future (that was a Marty McFly reference) with adaptive lacing (more on that shortly).

Nike has been focusing tremendously on their digital strategy in the last years and what it can do for them to set them apart from their competition, and there is plenty of evidence proving why Nike continues to be the market leader after 50 years in the business.

In this post, I would like to talk about Nike’s active role in shaping 3 trends in athletic apparel and fitness communities:

  • Platform applications to facilitate and encourage community training
  • Personalized/tailored performance
  • Technological enhancements in apparel and accessories

According to Mark Parker (President and CEO of Nike, aka best-job-for-free-gear), Nike’s digital community platform Nike+ offers what embodies the “era of personalized performance” to offer athletes a relationship rather than a dashboard (Dengate, 2016).

It all started with the Nike+ Running application, a collaboration with Apple wherein a running sensor allowed athletes to track their progress in distance, speed, and calorie burn (to my disappointment, it was missing a feature that tells you how many brownies you’re allowed to eat that day before breaking even with calorie count). But as always, Nike got more creative. Their new Nike+ App initiative connects its members to Nike+ Run Club (where they can run with the likes of Kevin Hart or just non-famous people in their city), as well as their Nike+ Training Club that offers on-demand training and coaching, the ability to book a class, and a personalized product store that suggests products for you based on your user activity, preferences, and size (Kell, 2016). It is also your link to Nike’s most limited products and has 10s of millions of users (Soni, 2014).

The idea is that your experience with Nike but also with fitness becomes personalized to trigger higher customer involvement and a bigger community amongst users.

Nike doesn’t want to be the only innovator adding value to their platform – their Nike+ Accelerator program helps developers build products and services using Nike’s user data and technologies that serve as complementary, value-added services. So not only are they connecting athletes, they’re connecting innovators to better connect athletes.

 

nexus2cee_2016-08-05-00_thumb (1)

 

So now they’ve got a community together that has a personalized product store literally at their fingertips.

Nike’s move? …It prints some shoes and makes some other ones come alive.

Nike is no newcomer to digital creativity in sports apparel: their futuristic eyewear product line Magneto used to be their next big thing in 1994 (without going into too much detail here, the idea involved taping magnets to your face to clip eyewear onto them(Carr, 2013) – apparently athletes didn’t love the idea, can’t imagine why…).

But then came the FuelBand, allowing users to connect (or brag, let’s be honest) via social media whilst training, and it sent a clear message: Nike is transforming and is making the move towards tech, data, and services (Fast Company, 2013). FlyKnit came next, where Nike decided that digital knitting would be a thing in order to give athletes a seamless, one-piece upper shoe. And then came the new movement:

              Tailored to the moment (Nike, 2016).

The SuperFly FlyKnit was mapped with biomechanical data from an athlete and a 3D printer then produced 30 iterations to tweak the configuration for stiffness and flexibility before finding her optimal fit. Finally, their Hyper Adapt shoe (dubbed EARL for “electro adaptive reactive lacing”), has introduced to the sports apparel world (at least those who can afford it), sport-informed adaptive lacing. To quote Nike, the shoe as a solution for idiosyncrasies in lacing and fit preferences is “precise, consistent, personalized, adjustable” (Nike, 2016). A sensor in the heel literally triggers the shoe to tighten to an ideal tension (Dengate, 2016) – the vision is that the shoe will one day be able to tighten with every step.

I know what you’re thinking – who cares, I can’t afford it anyway. But it would still be pretty cool (“excuse me while I quickly readjust the tightness of my shoe to the exact shape of my foot”). At least you can still run with Kevin Hart for free.

FY16_INNO_SNOWCAP_v2_HERO_RT_NoEarl_V1_hd_1600

 

 

References:

Carr, A., 2013. Why Nike Killed Magneto, its Futuristic Eyewear Product. Fast Company. Accessed on: 26/09/2016. Available at: <https://www.fastcompany.com/3006410/most-innovative-companies-2013/why-nike-killed-magneto-its-futuristic-eyewear-product >

Dengate, J., 2016. Nine Things We Learned at Nike’s Innovation For Everybody Event. Runner’s World [Online]. Accessed on: 26/09/2016. Available at: <http://www.runnersworld.com/gear-check/nine-things-we-learned-at-nikes-innovation-for-everybody-event >

Fast Company, 2013. Nike: The Most Innovative Company of 2013. Fast Company. Accessed on: 26/09/2016. Available at: <https://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2013/nike>

Kell, J., 2016. This New Nike App is Like a Concierge For Working Out. Fortune Magazine [Online}. Accessed on: 26/09/2016. Available at: <http://fortune.com/2016/08/02/nike-new-app-social-ecommerce/>

Nike, 2016. Nike Debuts Wave of Innovation With Adaptive Lacing and Nike+ App. Nike.com. Accessed: 26/09/2016. Available at: <http://news.nike.com/news/mark-parker-adaptive-lacing-nike-plus>

Soni, P., 2014. Traditionally Innovative: The History of Nike. Market Realist [Online]. Accessed on: 26/09/2016. Available at: <http://marketrealist.com/2014/12/traditionally-innovative-the-history-of-nike/>

Please rate this