Institute For The Future

Living in a Health Aware World

Over the next decade, the objects and environments that we interact with everyday are going to “wake up.” Once inanimate things will have new intelligence, which we can enlist to support our health and well-being aspirations. So, what happens when the pills we put in our bodies connect to our homes and clinics to capture and deliver health information? Or when sensors and cameras embedded in our environments create comprehensive, continuous records of our health? We call this the Health Aware World, where a new palette of technologies transforms health by bringing objects and environments to life.

Below is a shareable video overview of this research:

This video highlights a few of the forecasts from the map and provides signals of where we see a health aware world happening today. From wherever you are in the well-being economy—from urban planners to technologists and physicians—we hope this foresight provokes new ideas about how to increase engagement, enable prevention, promote equity, and forge new partnerships.

What if we could move to more passive sensing systems and diagnose with telepathic technologies? Cradle is an app developed that scans your photos to detect small white spots, which might be an early sign of a rare pediatric eye cancer.

Or what if we look to digital environments and immerse ourselves in a new experience of reality, much like this young woman did when she helped her dying grandmother use an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to experience a final “walk” outside.

At our annual member research meeting in November 2014, we presented these forecasts, and more, to a group of 50 healthcare innovators, entrepreneurs, physicians, and designers and then asked them to imagine what else is possible. We asked participants to come up with their most ridiculous ideas for what would be possible in a health aware world. That’s because, as renowned futurist Jim Dator says, “any useful statement about the future should at first appear to be ridiculous.”

if it’s not ridiculous, you’re not pushing yourself far enough, you’re not in the right frame of mind to explore the full range of future possibilities. A ridiculous idea pushes you out of your current context, gives you some distance from your present constraints, and allows you to adopt a long-term perspective.

But you can’t stop at just being imaginative. Once you’ve come up with a seemingly ridiculous idea, you need to think about it systematically to understand the future implications. Put people at the center and think through how they’d interact with your idea. This lets you connect your ridiculous idea to reality, and make it relevant, without getting caught up in short-term constraints like budgets or regulation, that artificially limit this stage of innovation.

Understand that we’re leveraging this methodology for making the ridiculous useful, because you have a tremendous opportunity to empower people and tap their creativity, sensitivity and wisdom to build the health aware world of tomorrow together. So, what will you make in a health aware world?

More Information

For access to the full Health Aware World research map or more information about becoming a sponsor of our health research, please contact Dawn Alva—[email protected].