Augmenting Humanity: Unlocking Our Super Powers with Technology

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.