Institute For The Future

Grad students designing the future

The Health Horizons Program often uses "iBuyRight" as a signal of the impact of mobile phone technology. It is an application that can provide shoppers with social and environmental information about a product, enabling them to make purchases aligned with their personal values. iBuyRight was developed as a thesis project by some graduate students at UCBerkeley's School of Information.

I recently came across a story about another interesting grad school project that demostrates how mobile technology can be used to impact health. At last month's SXSW Interactive Festival, a recent graduate of New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program introduced "Ovü," which is an armband that a woman wears to detect changes in her body temperature for the purpose of tracking her fertility. This mobile device essentially consists of a thermometer, a microchip, and a Bluetooth transmitter that sends occasional reminders via text message to both the woman and her partner (if desired) when she is at her peak fertility.

The blogger who wrote about the presentation of Ovü at SXSW offered the following insights about designing a mobile health device:

 

One: don't reinvent the wheel. [The designer] took the complex method women generally use to calculate their fertility and automated it in such a way as to allow the wearer more control over the data. Two: for a wellness device to be properly used, it mustn't be too intrusive into a person's life. Instead of looking like a medical device or a mobile widget, Ovü is a lacey armband that could easily pass as some bit of fashion flair. And three: the display is the most important feature. If people don't understand the data their collecting, it's worthless. And they need to be able to view the data in as many ways as possible and mine it in different ways. The more the user can do with their data, the better. This last point leads to what may be the most important thing about this new breed of bio-networked devices, according to [the designer]: if people control their own health and wellness data and can check it and keep an eye on it as one might check one's bank account or credit rating, then people will be on the whole much more in-tune to their own health and physiology. They will be able to make better choices and ultimately lead much healthier lives.

 

We are likely to see a profusion of bio-networked devices like Ovü and the already popular Nike + iPod system that use a sensor connected to a Bluetooth-type transmitter to send data to a mobile device. The data can then be pushed to a website, to the device's own display, etc. "The trick is knowing how to sense and interpret data properly." Developing sensemaking technology is the next big challenge for players in this space.