Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Clothes Are The New Health Product
A few years ago, I happened upon an article that essentially argues that the more wealth in a country, the more comparative value health has--which, by extension, suggests that other things seem comparatively less valuable. In other words, as we have more and better stuff--cars, smart phones, etc.--it becomes increasingly hard to create things that add as much value to our lives as, well, more healthy life.
So if you're in some other business, how do you maintain profits? Turn whatever you make into a health offering, of course.
Take the clothing industry.
Reebok, for example, recently acquired a flexible electronics startup company with the goal of embedding computing power into running clothes and other athletic gear to give athletes better insight into their biomarkers.
The athletic-apparel devices might incorporate sensors and a microprocessor to monitor many indicators of an athlete's health, such as impacts on the body, electrical information from the heart and nervous system, sweat pH, blood pressure, gait, and strain on joints. Such devices could process the data to generate information about metabolism and athletic performance and broadcast it to another device.
Other examples of apparel designed to improve physical health include a nightshirt that monitors the wearer's sleep levels. Other apparel is being designed to improve the environment that influences our health--for example, something called Catalytic Clothing, has been designed with nanoparticles that actively help purify the air around the garment (and its owner.)
The sudden rise of clothes that provide health benefits reminds me of the car industry, where everyone from Nissan, who wants its cars to spray vitamins into the air of the car, to Ford, who is trying to design cars that sync with medical devices, is investing in embedding health features into basic product design.
Now, it might be tempting to dismiss these examples as fringe concepts or something similar. But I think that misses the point.
To return to the argument from Robert Hall and Charles Jones that the value of health is increasing relative to the value of other things. They argue:
As consumption increases, the marginal utility of consumption falls quickly. In contrast, extending life does not run into the same kind of diminishing returns. As we get older and richer, which is more valuable: a third car, yet another television, more clothing —or an extra year of life? There are diminishing returns to consumption in any given period and a key way we increase our lifetime utility is by adding extra periods of life.
This strikes me as a very good description of a hidden force that will shape many people's lives--and, indeed, the consumer economy in developed countries--over the next decade.
Which is why, I think, that fringe apparel products and test designs from car companies are the beginning of something that we've already seen in industries like food. In a world where health is increasingly valuable, we should expect a constantly expanding set of products that promise that they'll improve our health.