Institute For The Future

Designing Health Interventions Around Our Weaknesses

My most recent Fast Coexist piece is up - taking a look at a concept I wrote about in 2010 called Embedded Health, which argues that the future of health design is to create interventions that help us overcome our weaknesses. It begins:

 

Samsung recently got some decent press coverage for a new prototype smartphone that uses all sorts of subtle cues--things like how fast a user types, how often that user makes typos--to gauge the in-the-moment mental state of its user, so that, at some point in the future, if you’re angry, for example, your phone might not let you send a text message to your boss. It’s an example of an emerging class of technologies that aim to measure subtle shifts in our moment-to-moment states, and then adjust to them behind our backs.

 

 

To read the rest, go here.