Future Now
The IFTF Blog
What Are The Health Benefits of That Sedan?
A few months ago, the automaker Nissan announced announced that its cars will soon spray out vitamin C at drivers to ward off skin damage, and that its seats will be specially designed to increase the blood flow of the driver. Your car, in other words, will be designed to improve your health.
Nissan isn't the only company thinking along these lines, incidentally. For example, a Danish company has developed something called the Anti-Sleep Pilot, which, according to DVICE, is designed to gauge how sleepy you are when driving and tell you when to pull over.
To tell you how sleepy you are, the Anti Sleep Pilot first needs to know your initial sleepiness level, on a scale of one to four. Four corresponds to "been out on the town the night before," according to the manual. Once you've got that set, you can hit the road.
In addition to monitoring your driving using an accelerometer, the Anti Sleep Pilot will give you a little reaction test every once in a while. It will make a sound and turn orange, at which point you have to smack it as fast as you can. The longer it takes you to do this, the more concerned the device gets about your reaction times, and if you're too slow on four tests in a row, it will turn an angry red and demand that you pull over and rest.
I know this seems like it would be super distracting, and it sort of is. But the occasional tests also help to keep your brain from turning into pudding, which can happen when you're tired or on long drives. The device is also smart enough to not care if you don't always hit it every single time, it just times you when you do, which gives you the option of focusing purely on driving when you need to. If you skip it four times in a row, though, it assumes you've been asleep for the last few minutes, and will freak out.
I actually saw a demo of the Anti-Sleep Pilot at this year's CES and was surprised that, unlike DVICE, I didn't find it distracting. Setting aside the user interface of Anti Sleep Pilot, I can't say that I'm surprised to see the car become the newest health purchase. The idea that health health is an increasingly important value-filter on our purchases has been one of the core premises of our research in the past few years, and as we begin our work looking at global well-being, I think one of the the emerging, and potentially very contentious areas of well-being will be transportation.
In some sense, particularly in North America, cars have been a hidden factor shaping our health and well-being for decades. Fast Food and cars fueled each other's growth, and the combination of cheap calories and effortless transportation has been a key driver of obesity. Pollution from cars contributes to asthma and all other sorts of other environmental health problems. A bad commute, at least according to some studies, is literally the worst thing a person can do for her happiness levels.
On the other hand, of course, cars make our lives much easier--and as a result, it's easy, looking from North America, to forget that in places like China, cars, and car culture, are one of the most exciting and welcomed aspects of economic development. For that matter, it's easy to get frustrated with the negative aspects of cars in the United States, while ignoring that, for the most part, most of us are utterly dependent on cars to get around.
I'm not sure if it's the growing recognition of the health costs of driving, or a desire to attract health conscious consumers, that is spurring companies like Nissan and Anti Sleep Pilot to experiment with embedding health into cars. But I think it points toward the tradeoffs we make in managing our health and well-being: If gridlock makes it hard to eat well and exercise, at least you can undo some of the damage with a Vitamin C vent. My sense is that this is an early signal suggesting that a decade from now, a car will be yet another thing people purchase, at least in part, based on how it contributes to health.