Smart wearable devices trap young people
”The data shows that you only have two years left in your life.”
If big data can predict your life in advance, would you want to know the answer?
In the 2022 Oscar-winning movie “Don’t Look Up”, technology tycoon Peter launched a mobile phone, which can monitor the user’s mood in real time, as well as various physical status indicators, including blood pressure, heart rate and so on. Based on a powerful database, Peter also predicted the way of death of one of the heroines, Jeanne Orleans. Ironically, this prediction turned out to be true in the end.
Today, with the popularity of wearable electronic devices and smart home appliances, we are falling into the “digital matrix” of technology companies – our dependence on data is gradually deepening, and we are eager for more “accurate” health information and more “scientific” health information. We try our best to quantify everything in life to know ourselves and predict the future.
This consumer field dominated by “quantified life” has a market size of hundreds of billions, and it is also undergoing a comprehensive transformation of our lives.
But the actual situation is that the “quantification road” deeply cultivated by technology giants has brought not only a beautiful lifestyle, but also a black mirror of technology that is getting out of control.
Sci-Fi Movies Come into Reality
In recent years, how many smart devices in sci-fi movies have come into reality?
10 years ago, James Bond successfully explored a series of secrets by relying on a smart watch in “007: Skyfall”. This watch, which is waterproof, camera-ready, and audio-recording, now seems to be just a standard configuration of an Apple Watch (Apple’s smart product). Overnight, Bond’s “intelligence artifact” can also be owned by ordinary people.
Similarly, Tom Cruise’s “black technology” smart contact lenses in “Mission: Impossible 4” have also begun to enter the market. In 2016, Sony developed a smart contact lens that can take pictures. Users only need to blink in a prescribed way to capture photos. In addition, users can also adjust the focus and aperture by turning their eyes.
The communication badge in “Star Trek” can now be shipped home for $99. In 2014, a technology start-up company in San Francisco launched the wireless communicator Onyx, which is similar to the badge in “Star Trek”. Users only need to fix it on their clothes, even if they get lost in the deep mountains and old forests, they can connect with the outside world anytime, anywhere .
With this wearable device, I suddenly understood a joke many years ago – “I’m living more and more like Bond these days”.
However, unlike the black technology ideas in science fiction films, the focus of smart wearable devices in real life is not to “teach you to steal secrets”, but their primary goal is to “improve personal health”.
Whether it is the smart watches, sports bracelets that have been hot in recent years, or the smart glasses promoted by Google, and the smart clothing that major technology companies have laid out imaginatively… Almost all wearable electronic devices are closely related to “health” “Do not let go of the word.
From heart rate, blood oxygen, blood pressure, to stress, breathing, to sleep, diet, exercise, wearable devices are like the most “volume” employees in the company, wishing to visualize all the conditions of your body PPT, show it to you.
Take a “sleep monitoring” that has been very popular in recent years. In China alone, it has spawned a market worth billions.
For traditional polysomnography, you need to go to the hospital to register and make an appointment, and then connect dozens of colored wires on your body to know whether you have slept well enough; but nowadays, from breathing sleep quality monitoring wristbands to general exercise wristbands Ring, to smart pillows, smart mattresses, all kinds of electronic devices can let you control your sleep status.
According to data from the Institute of Research and Industry, in 2021, the market size of my country’s household sleep monitoring equipment has reached 4.34 billion yuan. A real feeling is that overnight, many colleagues around you will read their sleep reports on a regular basis.
And this does not include market data for smart bracelets. According to data from iiMedia Consulting, the size of China’s smart watch market will be 29.5 billion yuan in 2021, and it is expected to exceed 40 billion yuan in 2025.
If you don’t know what “rapid eye movement period” is? I’m sorry, even if “sleep until dawn”, I’m afraid it’s not considered high-quality sleep for human beings.
It is foreseeable that more and more health topics will create a promising market.
Such as “mood monitoring” equipment. As early as a few years ago, Google Glass has learned to “monitor the user’s emotional health” – according to the changes in the user’s facial features, the glasses will help us automatically calculate the emotional ratio of anger/happy/sadness/surprise in the past 1 minute, respectively. How much did it take.
In addition, emotion tracking apps have also begun to be welcomed by young people. If mood was once an erratic and unpredictable thing, then since then, it can be evaluated and estimated, until you put emo (popular on the Internet) slang, meaning “melancholy” and “sadness”) always cut off in the cradle ahead of time.
Another interesting phenomenon is that smart clothing has also begun to sneak into our lives and closely monitor our every move.
A pair of smart running shoes can generate a series of health data-knee joint load index, foot landing method, running frequency, etc. From this point of view, no small partner will make the mistake of “walking outside the horoscope” in the future.
Picture wearables, your electronic oracles?
In the mid-19th century, the British physicist and father of thermodynamics, Lord Kelvin (Baron Kelvin), once said: “When you can quantify what you are talking about, and you can describe it numerically, you really understand it deeply. But if you can’t describe it with numbers, then your mind has not jumped to the state of scientific thinking at all.”
This concept of “using data to understand the world” dominated the trend of thought for more than a century.
Focusing on individuals, from initial height and weight to physical health, emotional health, and emotional relationships, data can gradually “estimate” things that were once unquantifiable.
Going back to the beginning of “Don’t Look Up”, using wearable devices to predict life expectancy, is it feasible?
The actual situation is that the truth of “life and death” cannot be easily rewritten by big data, but it is completely feasible to use big data to predict some other situations.
In 2020, researchers found that using the Oura smart ring can help users monitor the risk of influenza infection in advance.
How does a ring help humans predict viruses? According to the official statement of Oura Health, the technology in the Oura ring can monitor the most subtle physiological signals in the human body. By using the AI prediction model, it is possible to predict in advance the possibility of a user being infected with influenza based on indicators such as body temperature, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability.
In fact, as early as more than ten years ago, wearable devices showed the power of “cyber prophet”.
In 2012, the “First Early Warning System” company in Reno, Nevada, USA launched a smart underwear for women, which aims to help women predict the risk of breast cancer in advance.
According to the data of the World Health Organization in 2020, breast cancer accounts for 11.7% of the new cancer cases in the world (approximately 2.3 million breast cancer cases), surpassing the number of new cases of lung cancer for the first time, and becoming the main new cancer in the world. type of cancer.
And this “breast cancer prevention” smart underwear can predict whether there are suspicious lumps in the breast through built-in sensors.
At the technical level, the principle of this underwear is not complicated: because cancer cells in the human body usually cause abnormal blood vessels, resulting in temperature changes in corresponding parts of the body, this underwear senses and records the temperature through subtle, and then undergoes a A series of scientific calculations to obtain prediction results.
The company’s experiments show that the accuracy of this smart underwear in predicting breast cancer is higher than that of hospital X-ray examinations. In addition, it can also advance the diagnosis of breast cancer by 6 years and strive for more treatment for breast cancer patients. time.
Just in September of this year, a research team at Stanford University also developed a wearable device that can “monitor tumor size in real time”, so as to “review” the patient’s cancer treatment effect in time.
The device employs a “FAST sensor” (supported by depositing a 50 nm layer of gold on top of a styrene-ethylene-butylene-styrene drop-cast layer), which is very flexible and easily stretchable, so this small device It can be glued directly to the user’s skin and expand or contract accordingly as the tumor volume dynamically changes.
With the push of a button, the sensor can transmit real-time data to an app on the phone. Did the last cancer treatment work? Answers can be obtained quickly.
Meanwhile, smart wearables are being explored across a wide variety of chronic diseases, including skin cancer, asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, and more. Commercial companies promise us that in the future, smart devices will be able to provide everyone with the “disease warning” they need more accurately and quickly.
Tech Black Mirror: Who is using our data?
The popularity of wearable devices not only brings “healthy and scientific” body management supported by big data, but also may lead to a black mirror of technology.
Acxiom, a data company founded in 1969, has the world’s largest consumer database. As of 2020, Acxiom covers the data of 700 million users from various countries including the US, UK and Germany. These users are divided into 70 categories, and each category will have its matching consumption needs.
For a long time, there have been continuous data disputes about Acxiom, but this does not affect its smooth sale of user profile information to commercial companies at a “clear price”. Among them, Acxiom’s large customers include government agencies, large banks, insurance companies and medical institutions.
Research and analysis based on massive data can indeed provide ordinary people with more efficient health management solutions. For example, some domestic data companies have begun to cooperate with tertiary hospitals to share data resources and provide more information references for the latter.
But at the same time, these data can also be manipulated by business giants, putting consumers in a disadvantageous position.
For example, in the past, auto insurance had a relatively fixed price, but now auto insurance is like an advertisement on a mobile device, showing a situation of “thousands of people and thousands of faces”.
Car trackers are meant to help users understand their driving habits, but insurers can make good use of the value of the collected data—the driver’s heart rate, physical symptoms, fuel consumption, wheel speed, brakes while driving. The number of times can be uploaded to the sensor to help insurance companies make decisions and set prices.
For another example, a series of data collection can allow each individual to receive extremely precise marketing. An example would be sending an offer of new and suitable running shoes to a person when their running shoes reach a baseline replacement mileage.
In this process, the bargaining power of consumers is gradually weakened. In recent years, “big data killing familiarity” has become more and more common, leaving consumers with “transparent information” nowhere to hide.
Perhaps, when we are addicted to the personalized services brought by wearable devices, we must also realize that each of us is a free data laborer, providing technology companies with tens of billions of commercial value.
Just like the British drama “Black Mirror”, if one day technology evolves to the point where our interpersonal relationships can be represented by data (scores), then the people who benefit from this mechanism in the end will definitely not be ordinary people who have nothing , but those capitalists with data.
