Institute For The Future

Smart Places and Objects for Health

Staying healthy can be a lot of work, whether it means remembering to take your meds, keeping track of how much pie you're eating or figuring out how to squeeze a jog in between work and dinner. Last year's Map on the Future of Science, Technology, and Well-being 2020 Forecast, explored how some of the discipline and planning required to get those things done can be off-loaded onto our environment.

The Augmented Environments forecast on the map explains that, in a decade, we'll be able to modify our environments to optimize health. We can do this by embedding safety features, like sensors in carpets that can alert medical response when someone falls, or by incorporating nudges to encourage healthy behaviors into our environment.

Here's an example of what a home designed to encourage healthy weight management might look like in 2020:

You get home from work and go to wash your face in the bathroom. You take a look in the mirror and you see your face, only it's not your face. Not exactly. Instead, it's what your face would look like in a year if you keep up your current exercise and eating habits. Next to the pudgy but recognizable you in the mirror, there is text that reads, "eat lighter tonight."

You go to your combination fridge/freezer and open it up. You see a selection of healthy foods and nothing else. That's not because it's all you have in there, it's because you're wearing augmented reality glasses that don't allow you to see the frozen pizza and pint of super-premium ice cream, at least not yet. 

So you sit down with a relatively healthy dinner of pasta and salad, turn on the TV and start shoveling food into your mouth. But after a few bites, your fork starts mildly vibrating, indicating you should be eating more slowly. You finish your meal and head back to the fridge/freezer. You can now see the ice cream, as you've finished your light meal, but there is text above that reads, 'You're allowed 1/2 standard scoop.'

Some of the technology in this future scenario is available or in development right now. Augmented reality mirrors, for instance, are being developed by a number of organizations for a number of purposes. Perhaps closest to our forecast, James Law created the CyberLecture mirror, which "delivers information on your state of health while doubling up as a personal exercise coach."  Vlado Kitanovski and Ebroul Izquierdo of the Multimedia and Vision research group at Queen Mary, University of London, are developing an augmented reality mirror program with the somewhat dubious application of giving people previews of what they'd look like if they got plastic surgery (although there are many legitimate reconstructive surgery needs). And AR mirrors for shopping—like the one at Disneyland's Tomorrowland that lets kids try on different outfits virtually—are starting to crop up too. Augmented reality glasses are already available to consumers (but at five thousand dollars a piece). Sensor-embedded carpets, like the Infineon Thinking Carpet, have been developed.  And so have sensor-embedded shirts.

But regardless of what specific products go big in the future, augmented environments are definitely coming and they will make for a wide array of exciting new health interventions.