Wearable technology: The future will be more beautiful and practical

June 1 News, the Atlantic Monthly network version of the recent Review article pointed out that the development of wearable technology is bright, but with the appearance of cool but very limited, the existing wearable equipment, the future of the equipment will pay more attention to product function and connotation.

The article reads as follows:

In a very ordinary day in 1998, David Fellet (David Fairley), the statistician, went to school to pick up his son as usual. The streets are bustling with traffic. But in the halfway, Felley suddenly feel not gung-so, dizzy.

Felley recalls: "In fact, there was a homeless tramp who saw that I was not in the right position and helped me keep going to school." The people at the school told me to lie down and rest for a while. ”

Felley felt better after a short rest, but the school insisted that he go to the hospital to see. On the way to the hospital, Felley heart attack.

Felley moved to the Bay Area several years ago and served in the Air Quality administration (Quality Management District). He has been responsible for collecting research information related to people's health and mortality, especially the latest research on diseases of the heart, especially cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, that may lead to a rise in death rates in a particulate suspended environment. At that time, all the research work was done by a researcher in London.

"I thought the Bay area was not the same as London, and London was colder and wetter than it was, where people often suffered from respiratory illnesses," Felley said. To be honest, I initially wanted to prove that the researcher was wrong. "He took a Santa Clara in California's county, and he was surprised that his findings were almost identical to those of the London researcher."

Since then, several other studies have drawn the same conclusions as Felley's findings. It is now possible to affirm that the particle size of suspended particles in the air is related to the mortality rate of people. Shortly after the heart attack, Felley also found in other studies that if the body were exposed to ultrafine particles such as a busy downtown area, it would likely cause coronary heart disease in an hour or so.

He said: "Of course, there may be other factors that lead to the onset of the disease, but I believe that walking along that street must be an important factor in my heart attack." The particulate matter in the air is very small and very uncomfortable. They can be irritating, gathering together to form higher particles or spreading outward. From the road in the air of the particle cascade distribution map can be seen, the more bustling streets, the air in the concentration of ultrafine particles higher. The situation is quite different from the other streets that are not so noisy. ”

Still, Felley goes through the bustling streets every day to work, pick up children from school and go home, for years. He said: "After many years, I gradually understand that I really should change the route, try to avoid the bustling streets." ”

Even in the field of particulate matter experts and experienced the effects of particulate matter, it was many years before Felley adjusted his course of action. This is a fundamental problem that people face when making complex decisions related to human health and the urban environment. We don't need to know the information we need, we just have to make the right choice. In other words, we only need to have the right information when making a decision.

Smart wrist bands, smart watches, smart costumes and even a gas mask with built-in wireless sensors, these wearable devices can solve the problem. These devices can not show the mountains do not reveal the mountain quietly collect all kinds of data on the streets, the data is then compared to historical data published by government departments, academic institutes and other scientific institutions, and then the right information can be pushed to the user at the right time, and a new generation of wearable devices will provide users with more useful, More effective and operable information.

Portable pollution detectors

Existing wearable equipment from Fitbit to Pebble Smart watch, from Google glasses to the upcoming iwatch, can be divided into two main categories: one is to provide information such as Google glasses and a variety of smart watches, the other is to collect information such as Fitbit and Nike Energy wrist strap. Next-generation wearable devices want to combine these two features, collect user personal data, and then analyze user data against other datasets, and then provide customized information and advice to users.

Therefore, the pollution monitoring as an example, can be developed to detect the current degree of environmental pollution of the smart wrist strap, if the user went to a high concentration of ultra-fine particles in the region, the smart wrist strap will send a vibration hint or flashing red light, reminding users to change a road. This is not only beneficial to individual health, but also to raise public awareness of the link between pollution and health.

An increasing number of wearable equipment companies are starting to provide data for academic research institutions and government departments. For example, the aforementioned smart wrist strap, which detects environmental pollution, can help the air Pollution Management Department to develop regulations and make meaningful policies, in addition to alerting users to environmental pollution.

But there are concerns that wearable devices may reveal personal privacy and are unwilling to provide data flow to government agencies. At the same time, government officials and developers are also working to develop systems to protect their privacy so that they can use anonymous data to win and benefit each other.

Jonathan Lansey, a data engineer at Quanttus, a wearable technology company, is developing a Jonathan Lance watch that detects and analyzes signs of vital signs such as the wearer's heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature. Like many other companies in the new field of wearable equipment, Quanttus is also actively seeking partnerships with academic institutions, which it intends to provide data for academic institutions.

So far, there have been few cases of data being provided to government agencies, and there have been more barriers, such as inefficient government bureaucracy, privacy concerns and data system mismatches.

However, Lanser claims that Quanttus's plan is to provide users ' data to academic research institutions, to help the latter conduct peer-reviewed research, and then to provide government departments for reference when formulating policies.

Steve Jungmann, vice president of product management at Quanttus, said: "I think we will make a huge contribution in this area and we will be doing business in this area, but there are also factors that benefit society." "In addition to providing data, the company will invest in a wide range of equipment for research purposes." "We have doors to MIT, so we often talk to people in academia, mostly on issues related to biological testing, such as air quality, mood, ability to work under pressure, etc.," he said. ”

A talking tree.

Most intelligent city technologies are designed to liberate humans and reduce the probability of human error. The designers of wearable devices, on the contrary, aim to provide the right information to people at the right time and integrate them into the network of intelligent cities, making them part of the solution for the entire intelligent city. It is a good example to give the public a better understanding of the dangers of air pollution and to make a corresponding change in their lives.

Frog Design Group, a global product strategy and designer, is one of the early entrants to the wearable equipment industry, and it has designed product samples for Motorola as early as 2002. In 2012, the company sent a team of designers to offices around the world, bringing back 8 different concepts of wearable equipment for the future, specifically included in the report on wearable technology and the city of the Internet.

About half of these concepts are technologies that can benefit the environment. One concept is the ability to detect the degree of air pollution of the smart mask, which is designed by its Shanghai office, may soon be put on the market. Other concepts are still in the research stage, but those concepts are also instructive for product companies and for government departments that intend to combine civilian targets with wearable technologies.

Frog's New York team, for example, is working to improve the ease of use of public transport systems. They designed a wrist strap called relay, which collects data from the big New York Transportation Authority (Metropolitan Transit Authority) and displays it in real time. So if you're thinking about taking a taxi or a subway, relay can tell you when you want to get to the subway station you're going to.

"This is where the data is needed and most useful," said Mayo Nissen, an interactive designer at the Frog Design Division in New York Meonissen. It's a good time to check on your computer before you go out on the bus, subway or train, but if you can get that data at any time, you'll be able to make more flexible decisions when you go out. ”

Such technologies are likely to increase passenger traffic in smart cities because they can make citizens feel more convenient and comfortable.

Other concepts of frog research focus on using wearable technology to raise people's awareness of environmental protection. For example, "Tree Voice" is actually a display network, all the screens that make up the network are attached to trees. The network, which has already covered all parts of Austin, Texas, can show passers-by various environmental factors such as drought, pollution, the possible effects of chemical spills on trees, and a companion app that shows how trees around the city have changed over a given period of time.

"The environment has been collecting and storing information about weather change and pollution, which is one of the areas that we want to delve into," said Eric Boam, Senior Interactive designer at the Frog Austin Division. If you saw a tree, you could see through the tree rings which years were plentiful and which years were dry and thirsty, and you could see when the local environment began to go bad. We want to collect and present the information stored in the environment and show it to the world so that people can see these problems more clearly and improve the environment around them through real actions. ”

Carlos Elena-lenz, chief technology strategist at the Frog Shanghai Division, is also working on a similar study that has recently been studying a wearable product that detects changes in the air, such as temperature and smoke concentrations, in Lenze. Then change the color accordingly. When people walk in the street in this dress, their coats change color according to the surroundings. He said: "This information will become a conversation, people can communicate with each other." ”

Ordinary truths

As with most technological innovations, wearable technologies need to address some of the barriers that can be widely accepted by society, even with some side effects. Most people now talk about the advantages and benefits of wearable technology, especially its role in health care and fitness, but the current generation of wearable devices is actually quite limited. For example, the Fitbit wristband, now very popular, is made up of two basic accelerometers, a low-power Bluetooth component and a mobile application. The accelerometer can measure the wearer's behavior to estimate the amount of heat consumed, the distance travelled, the number of steps taken and the time of sleep. Its altimeter can also detect the number of steps on the wearer. But if you are not on the steps, the Fitbit wrist strap will not be able to detect your behavior, it can not tell the difference between climbing all day and lying on the couch all day. Similarly, although many wearable devices claim to be able to detect whether the wearer is sleeping or exercising, their accuracy has yet to be improved.

Quanttus's Jiangman said: "Many wearable devices collect data just to collect data, they do not collect associated data or analyze the data, which we call inefficient data (so-what)." ”

When wearable technology companies learn not to talk big and develop more accurate wearable devices, powerful sensors are available, which may improve algorithms, improve data analysis and data visualization, and make wearable devices more powerful and useful, But this must be achieved in cooperation with the research institutions of government departments and academia. So far, integrating public data sets with their own tools is still a difficult task for wearable technology companies. Because regions, states and federal governments and academic institutions do not want to share their data. This is usually because the data they own is a fairly cluttered dataset collected from a stale system. But the situation has begun to improve, according to Lanser. For example, the Boston government recently launched an Open data program asking local developers what type of data they want and which format.

"In the end, we will be able to get more data analysis at the population level and then analyze the relationship between the health status of the entire city and the data on climate data or pollution levels," Lanser said. That way we can provide more reliable statistics and advice to the public. ”

"Boston is a good example of this," said Elena Lenze. They summoned the developer community to a meeting in town hall to listen to their views. For example, communication and communication around traffic data lasted a year or so before they released the application interface. Since they started working with developers early on, the developer community immediately released a large number of applications to support the public transport system when the data were released. ”

State governments have understood the benefits of sharing data with wearable technology developers, and Boston is not a special case. Last year, when the federal government launched the Open Source database project Open data on the web hosting platform GitHub, President Obama signed an executive order to use open, machine-readable data as a new standard for government information. Since then, state governments in 50 U.S. states have published 112 open datasets on the site, and have been eager to find innovative ways to use those data.

But moving the data in the opposite direction, from wearable devices to government data sets, is much more difficult. Users are apparently unwilling to give the data to the government because of concerns about personal privacy violations. Only 22% of Americans are willing to share their geographic data with government agencies, according to a recent survey commissioned by the IT hosting company Rackspace. 32% of Americans are willing to share their health data with government agencies or health care providers.

So far, government departments have used the data collected by wearable devices to determine what type of data and application interfaces they should provide to wearable device developers. For example, in Utah State's Google Glasses pilot project, the state's State Department's IT staff have been focusing on which applications have the highest usage rates, and then determine which datasets and application interfaces are most useful to Google's application developers.

Jonathan Collins, chief analyst at New York, the market research and market intelligence firm that specializes in wearable technology, reckons that in the healthcare sector, global wearable equipment shipments will reach 42 million this year. Although millions of people are now tracking their own health and fitness data, and most health care providers are interested in acquiring and using those data in some way, they have been struggling with privacy concerns and the privacy of electronic medical records, Collins said. "If you automate the collection of health data, there must be a safe place to store data and integrate data with other medical records," he said. In order to achieve that goal, the electronic medical record is the key, and it has often become the limit of this type of wearable equipment to promote the culprit. ”

As data sources continue to grow, the worry about how data is collected and shared is getting heavier. While every wearable technology company quickly comes out to explain that the data will be anonymous and that the cloud services that store the data are safe, it is not hard to imagine that the increase in data accuracy is likely to prompt insurers to raise premiums, Government departments and other companies are also doing more to peep at consumers.

From cool devices to active platforms

In addition to the availability and accuracy of data, wearable technology companies face a more fundamental problem, which is commercial viability. Wearable technology has been in the health care field for many years and has been successful, and pedometer is a good example. While wearable technology companies claim they have invested billions of of billions of dollars in the field, some of the equipment available in the highly competitive consumer electronics sector may not be able to pass the economic viability test even if some of the existing equipment is coming out next year.

However, while individual wearable devices may not survive, the pace of development of the entire wearable equipment market will not weaken in the short term. If, as Futurists predict, we will carry 4 to 6 smart devices in the not-too-distant future, it will certainly be better to include a wearable device that is good for our health and environment.

"Now, people are focused on whether the appearance of the device is cool or stylish," said Nathan. It would be better if wearable technology could one day be a technology that would have a real impact on people's daily lives and benefit mankind. When small devices are no longer in demand, the large equipment is displayed.

As for what wearable technology can do, we may just as well be superficial about the extent to which wearable technology will be incorporated into an intelligent city's optical network.

"One of the ultimate goals is that any wearable technology can be built as a platform, like a PC," Baum said. We have no idea what we can get out of it, but once these devices and technologies become common in people's daily lives and become stable and strong enough, they can do great things. “

(Responsible editor: Lvguang)