Man meets machine: The Drum investigates the true value of wearable tech

Neil Harbisson, affectionately known as ‘The Human Cyborg’, is one of them. Harbisson was born with a visual impairment that means he has only ever seen in greyscale. In order to perceive a world of colour, he had a microchip installed in the back of his head. This chip converts information from a light sensor positioned above his eyes into frequencies that stimulate the bones of his inner ear. The result: audible colours.

Many of us consider our smartphone integral to our everyday existence, but after a decade, Harbisson considers his device a part of his body. In a Ted presentation he said, “When I started to dream in colours I felt that the software and my brain had united”. He added: “I think life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for our mobile phones and start creating applications for our bodies”.

From Nike FuelBands to neuro-pacemakers, LED couture to Google Glass, our relationships with digital devices are becoming ever more intimate as they begin to adorn and enhance the human body in fascinating ways. Are we fast approaching a cybernetic era, where digital hardware blends seamlessly with our biological ‘wetware’ and gives our every step, breath, and heartbeat an online presence?

Much of the groundwork for this scenario has already been achieved by the health and fitness industries, where wearable technologies have obvious applications in monitoring physical performance and biometrics. The wider Quantified Self movement is home to personal data enthusiasts, who have pioneered novel forms of self-knowledge by monitoring sleep patterns and brain waves via EEG headsets.

For those brave enough to believe that emerging technologies such as these could yield major transformations to our economic landscape, The Drum’s 4 Minute Warning offered valuable insights into some of the most telling innovations – including new mobile technologies, and the role they will play within the digital ecosystems of the near future.

The impact of new technologies can be difficult to summarise, let alone gauge in advance. Even the most ambitious futurologists rarely claim to know how a given innovation will fare in the long run. But those who have their eyes on wearable technology tend to agree that it will transform the way we generate and consume data, make everyday decisions, and engage with media content.

An article published this year by Wired. co.uk suggested that although many wearable technologies already exist as prototypes in university labs, they are not likely to become mainstream unless they receive investment from the fashion industry. If this happens however, we could see a major influx of electronic body-tech on our high streets.

Financial services company Credit Suisse recently published a report claiming that wearable technology will have “a significant and pervasive impact on the economy”. The industry is currently valued at between $3-5bn but could expand to $50bn within three years, it says.

The imagination runs wild at all the possible unions of man and machine. But while devices and their standalone functions can be life changing, as Harbisson attests, many of those concerned with macro-economic trends – such as Oliver Stokes, principle of design and innovation at PDD – suggest that the true value of wearable tech will stem from devices that communicate within a wider ecosystem.

The increasing availability of cheap sensors is contributing to a world where everyday objects, such as your fridge, take on radically new functions when combined with information from their non-human peers.

“The idea of wearables is actually to link in with a larger digital ecosystem of products, that over the next five to ten years will start to communicate independently of us, and be able to recommend things to us as users,” explains Stokes.

Imagine that your fitness device informs your fridge that you’ve just run 10k. Your fridge then shares this fact – along with information about what it has in stock – with your Sainbury’s app, which at the opportune moment tells you that you’re running low on high-protein foods, and recommends the two-for-one steaks in aisle three.

This burgeoning cloud network has been dubbed ‘the internet of things’, and the data it generates may soon weigh in on how we make everyday decisions.

Stokes suggests that users will come to expect wearable devices that not only provide specific functions, but give recommendations or diagnostics that are both relevant and contextual.

“It’s when you start seeing links between devices, and between companies and industries that you see huge benefits for the user starting to arise,” he adds.

To this end, wearable tech companies are increasingly making their software open source, encouraging third party developers to use their products in novel ways. The Fitbit Flex fitness device for example, comes with a several third party apps and a free developer kit.

Amidst the hype of big data business models, multiple speakers commented on the value of the data generated by advanced mobile technologies. When several aspects of a person (from location and destination to latest search term and heart rate) are datafied, the potential for inferring what content that person will find relevant grows massively.

“We are becoming walking sensors. At the moment my phone can tell you where I am and what I’m doing, but a wearable piece of kit can tell you how I’m feeling, or how healthy I am, or how hard I’m working. And then in terms of brands, wearable tech is another way to personalise your services,” explains Work Club strategy partner, Paddy Griffith.

Social networks have transformed the way brands relate to consumers, but Griffith points out that consumer participation is currently dominated by what he calls the ‘big sharers’ – the 10 per cent who actively engage and share relevant content. In the near future however, consumer stories may be increasingly driven by the passive accumulation of data as they go about their device-laden lives.

“The reality is everything we do is generating data, that data is generating stories and that generates a connection to other people in other places and other stories”, says Griffith, who also suspects that consumers will soon wake up to the true value of the data they create, and in turn “expect brands to know [their] name and get the message right”.

Others have commented that the value of consumer data is not always obvious, yet always open for evaluation. According to 4 Minute Warning speaker Anthony Mullen, senior analyst at Forrester Research, this plays into the hands of any business that can combine and leverage that data intelligently. The upshot: digital disruption levels the playing field.

“It’s now cheaper to disrupt and no matter your business size you can be much more powerful than ever before, tapping into distribution networks and social networks. It’s about being better, strongerand faster than your competitors,” says Mullen.

“Lifting a whole set of digital technologies and software isn’t what sets digital disruptors apart – digital is just a tool, a means to an end – it’s seeing a human need and highlighting what that is, noticing what people want and what they currently get and then moving quickly to improve that,” he adds.

As companies vie for our attention within this digital maelstrom, users of wearable technologies may become increasingly preoccupied with managing their connections – filtering the stories they receive and share, including those created by brands.

“It’s not brands deciding how they will talk to consumers anymore; it is consumers deciding how they’re going to talk to brands. We’ll decide what access we give different brands to our data and licence ourselves to those we want to hear from,” says Griffith.

A similar analysis was offered by Mullen: “With so many devices and means of connection, eventually we need to find a way to manage it all or it’ll all just become like one giant blinking Tokyo high street. We need to find a way to make all of these devices effective and ambient, because the reality is thumbs won’t be able to keep up with it all. We need to start discussing an ‘internet of things’. It’s not just about smartphones and tablets; it becomes about your car, house, front door, shoes, luggage tag – it all has the ability to become connected, and we need to work out a way to manage the noise.”

Each wearable technology will have the potential to generate useful data, but the value extracted will likely depend on how it that data is combined with information from other sources. If advances in biotechnology are anything to go by, it would seem that the human body is an emerging source of data in its own right. The question perhaps, is what stories, diagnostics and entire business models will this enable?

Life as a cyborg - how Neil Harbisson sees beyond the expected

Born with achromatopsia, a condition that made him see in black and white, Neil Harbisson’s mission to experience colour has seen him become the world’s first legally recognised cyborg.

“I was always intrigued by colours, and I was always reminded of colours, when you can’t see them you become more aware that colours are everywhere – James Brown, the country Greenland, even just looking at a map, which is so often based in colour, I found myself getting so confused,” he explained during the The Drum’s recent 4 Minute Warning conference.

In 2003 Harbisson was fitted with the first version of the ‘eyeborg,’ a then cumbersome piece of kit – complete with 5kg computer – enabling him to pick up the frequency of colours and condense it into sound. This allowed him to experience the subtle nuances of colour for the first time, with the sound a colour makes not only dependent on hue but also saturation and light.

Being able to hear colour opened up a new world for Harbisson, giving new life to art, inanimate objects and even faces, and since the installation of the initial eyeborg 10 years ago he has made numerous upgrades to the software.

With the technology residing in Harbisson’s physical body, he faced issues getting a passport and had to fight the home office in order to get his ‘antenna’ legally recognised as part of his appearance. And in 2004, after his passport photo was initially rejected by the passport office, he eventually received a UK passport recognising his altered appearance, making him the first legally recognised ‘cyborg’.

“Cybernetics has become an extension of my actual body,” he says. “My chip is an extension of my brain, I am not an extension of technology – I am technology.”

In 2010 Harbisson set up the Cyborg Foundation to bring together those who had made the decision to extend their human experience with the integration of technology, developing cybernetic eyes for blind people, earrings which extend your spatial awareness, implants which allow you to feel earthquakes and cameras which can be installed into your extremities.

Despite the futuristic feeling of it all, Harbisson reveals that the reasoning behind this is “not to feel closer to machines, but to feel closer to nature”.

He explains: “We [members of the Cyborg Foundation] feel closer to animals. For me having an antenna doesn’t make me feel closer to robots, it makes me feel closer to insects who also have antennas. Some of these things we think are anti-natural are actually the opposite, and I encourage people to experiment with this.

“We could all easily extend our perception of the world around us and that is the next stage. It’s time to focus on extending our knowledge.”