By Sanjiv Goyal featuring Sridhar Iyengar
What you will learn:
- IoT Market Trends
- How data collected by fitness trackers will affect our future
- Barriers to Tech Innovation
- How COVID is a catalyst for tech advancements
- How Big Pharma is leveraging smart tech
Applying IoT and Biomarker Tracking
The health and fitness market has grown significantly over the last two decades and continues to grow despite recently being disrupted by COVID19. Fitness trackers represent the newest tech innovations in that market.
We have gone from counting steps to sleep tracking to an Apple watch that will measure blood oxygen levels. Fifteen years ago that was a twinkle in an entrepreneur’s eye.
According to Fortune Business Insights, The global fitness tracker market is worth $30.41 billion dollars. It is expected to reach $91.98 billion by 2027. What does this mean for our future?
The ability to measure and track everything using technology like cameras and sensors has existed for quite a long time. The tech has been around for years, in some cases decades, but integrating it into the mainstream market is proving to be a slower process than entrepreneurs and futurists anticipated.
As William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” As Sridhar Iyengar, futurist, entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Elemental Machines pointed out in this week’s segment of Confessions of a Futurist with Sanjiv Goyal, the issue is not the technology.
He recalled being at the Consumer Electronics Show ten years ago. He was privy to a behind-the-scenes look at the surveillance technology employed in Casinos. From the control room, a person anywhere on the premises could be followed by an entire fleet of cameras from room to room and even down the street into another casino. This type of tracking was routine and commonplace a decade ago.
Whether it is IoT tracking using sensors and cameras that are part of a larger system like in the casino example, or biomarker and motion tracking via personal devices like an Apple watch, the data is being collected.
A Global Data Set
As tracking becomes commonplace we are building on a data set driven in large part by the Apple and Google health initiatives. What remains to be seen is will be able to grasp the full context of this data and find correlations across multiple variables? Will we end up with a holistic understanding?
When the biomarker tracking market reaches its prime, we will be able to better understand human health. We need alert people behind the wheel.
During our conversation Sridhar brought up the example of a major auto manufacturer, BMW, exploring correlations between glucose levels and driving abilities. Because you can pass out if your blood glucose drops and that is a road safety hazard, the company took an interest in collecting health data.
Companies are becoming increasingly interested in the health of their customers because it affects how they interact with their products. In the case of a vehicle, it’s a life or death situation and certainly a problem worth solving. And thankfully we have the tech to do it.
We have added almost 5 billion more people to our population over the last 100 years. Our world is changing dramatically and the data collected by smart tech is helping us gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our planet.
In order to support continued population growth, we have to build better infrastructure and accept our role as spiritual beings. The architects of that infrastructure as well as entrepreneurs need to pivot to a more meaningful purpose and collaboratively create win-win-win solutions.
“Getting the data from your body and analyzing it isn’t the hard part,” Sridhar observed, “the hard part is deploying it to the mass market (in a reliable way that makes sense.)”
It’s one thing to experiment with new technologies and play around in your garage or lab, it’s another to elevate them to the degree where they are ready to be released for mass consumption.
The technology exists for someone to be able to drive a car with their thoughts. Perfecting the functionality of the technology is only one part of the equation. The human element has to be kept in mind when designing these systems. People must be trained and educated in the proper and responsible and effective use of these innovative technologies.
“It’s one thing for the tech to be reliable but then you have to integrate the human and psychological and training component. That’s where so much new tech fails because they don’t consider this.”
Getting Past the Red Tape
If the sophistication of the technology isn’t the problem, other than potential user misuse and error, what else is preventing widespread use of IoT and biomarker sensors?
Barriers to Mass Adoption of Innovative Technologies:
- Economic
- Ethical
- Regulatory
The barriers are economic, ethical, and regulatory. The cost is going down as production costs diminish, but the other two factors are sources of frustration and slow progress especially for entrepreneurs and technologists who intimately understand the world of possibilities these kinds of tech advancements open up for humanity.
We are living in a reality where technology can augment people’s abilities. “We have the tech to give people superpowers today,” that is if you suspend the abovelisted barriers. For example, we have exoskeletons that allow a person to lift ten times more weight than they normally could. The ability to control a video game with the mind has been around for twenty-five years.
The tech is here to stay. The problem is there aren’t sufficient regulations for the intention behind its use. The same technology that can track a thief or a kidnapper, can also be used for spying and eavesdropping. How do we draw ethical lines around augmentation and set limits that protect people’s rights?
The question isn’t so much, how can we make the world a better place using this technology, but how can we create the conditions in the world for the ethical use and speedy implementation of these revolutionary innovations. How do we get past the red tape with integrity so these inventions and innovations can start serving a higher purpose?
Sridhar predicts, “I think the first place you will see mass adoption of this is for people who have lost certain abilities like sight or hearing.” Human augmentation in order to get back to baseline biological performance will likely be the first area where there will be few ethical questions asked and perhaps will be a doorway to mass adoption of these technologies.
A Futurist’s Confession
Sridhar’s confession on this week’s show was one I think every entrepreneur and deep thinker can relate to; he confessed to getting so absorbed in a vision of a brighter future that he lost touch with reality.
“As engineers scientists and technologists, we often think about how the world can be in the future, and we think of it so deeply we think everyone should be living that way.”
Living in our tech and future-focused bubble, tech entrepreneurs believe their solutions and ideas to be obvious and necessary, but the media, the world at large, and consumers may not be warmed up to them in quite the same way.
A successful meta-entrepreneur knows when the time is right and keeps one eye on the market. If the paradigm hasn’t shifted enough and the consumer can’t see the practical application, it is likely a product launch will fall flat.
The problem with that uneven distribution is that the folks working in tech make the somewhat false assumption that what we think is a tech advance and what the world needs is often quite a bit into the future as compared to what the market can support.
When you live in the future, in a wondrous world of possibility, it is easy to become disconnected from the world around you. When you live in a dream, reality can be a hard pill to swallow.
Timing Is Everything
Sridhar’s previous venture, Misfit Wearables, was tracking sleep before it was cool, and he believes they were a bit early to the game. I had a similar experience when I designed the first GPS vehicle tracking system in Singapore long before GoogleMaps or even Mapquest was a blip on anyone’s radar. Timing is vital to entrepreneurial success, but you live and you learn.
Through the data that Misfit collected from sensors consumers placed under their mattresses, the company was able to demonstrate it is possible to correlate different stages of sleep with movement. The sensors would monitor breathing and heart rate to create a multidimensional picture of sleep quality.
Now our personal devices have the ability to track our sleep and there is published data and clinical studies that indicate that not only sleep duration but diet is correlated to sleep quality.
Sridhar’s latest venture Elemental Machines is an IoT company. Five years ago the company was helping big pharma come up with solutions for faster vaccine and drug production times. For longer than five years this problem has persisted in the biotech industry, but it wasn’t until COVID19 created a catalyst that it took center stage and became public knowledge and thus a global issue.
“Look at the last 12 months and what the media has been focused on. How do we get the biotech and pharma industry to invent and develop vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics faster, and once you have them how do you get them under cold storage conditions to the user? The media has finally put a spotlight on what we have been doing, but the problem was always there.”
Hopefully, it won’t take another pandemic for us to think like global citizens, educate ourselves, and collaborate to use tech ethically to find solutions to world problems before they become dire.
