How wearable technology will change our lives?

The innovation offered by the internet and smartphones and wearable technologies has revolutionized how we process and access information. This trend has affected how we now live and also how much of attention we should start paying to it now.

To begin with, Gonzalo Tudela in the video discussed about the paradigm shift in how we access information. Starting with the very first wearable device, the wrist watch, which was a New Year’s gift to the Queen of England in 1571. Next was the Abacus ring in 1644, a device used for calculating was miniaturized to serve as a cutting edge solution for traders in that era. In 1950, the spy button camera was created during the cold war as a spy tool. The Gambling shoe in 1961 contains the first wearable computer in form of chips underneath the shoe for Casino’s accurate prediction. By 1979, the wearable computing began to crystallize, with back packs and helmet containing chips, the foundation for a future of wearables was laid. Bluetooth technology in year 2000 enabled people to talk hands-free especially while driving. In September 2009, the Fitbit tracker became commercialized, an invention that took the connectivity, mobility, connection, communication and computing in one device which were then merged and put in commercial consumer space.

September 2009, was the first point of commercialization of modern wearable computing, which means we are at a level of mass adoption that we had never seen before in wearable computing. In the graph shown by Gonzalo from the Vandrico analysis of the theory of singularity, it showed how long 25% of the US population took to embrace a technology. He interpreted the graph to be that in 5 years, 25% of the US population should be adopting the wearable technology. The adoption curve is another graph that follows the normal distribution curve and with data from tech companies, the date of adoption at 25% matches the projection from the Vandrico graph.

The next phase to where technology or innovation will be can be monitored by three key elements; activity monitors, head mounted displays and smart watches. Activity monitors are devices that quantifies the human bodies, the head-mounted displays are computers on our head that create information and smart watches are for all intent purposes like cellphones in a watch. Smart watches also provides benefits for 2-D monitors like coordination in analytics and can also create the benefits of head mounted display by creating information. The Gartner hype cycle relates the visibility of technology to maturity and we can extrapolate how we are going to move forward. As technology first come out, everyone is excited, expectation goes up, enterprises enter and make investments to continue with the value chain and then the curve progress to a plateau of productivity. The three aforementioned elements can then be used to plot the main relationship of wearable technology, where they are going to be and at what point they are in the visibility or maturity stage.

There are two main areas discussed by Gonzalo in the video on how wearable technology will affect lives and workplace, the enterprise and health care system. With the enterprise, the technology is just about to enter the adoption level. The first four points has to do with pushing information to users, the next four points is with pulling information, in communication, information flow and safety. Enterprise offer a unique opportunity to connect existing safety system to existing enterprise and analytics system directly to mobile workers in hands free way. With this, there will be a shift in tasks and millions of investments in analytics will be able to connected and create actionable data for real-time events. In the medical field, new sensors will be medically relevant, instead of running heart rates, sleep and calories, we will take glucose, cholesterol, things we normally checkup when we go to doctors, and this could solve the medical crisis in the next 5 to 10 years. It will allow us to be more efficient in data collection.

In summary, technology will affect our lives in enterprise situational awareness, by not just giving information but also contextual situation information. Medical diagnosis will be better, human lives will be saved by managing healthcare costs and economy will shoot higher than we ever imagine.