Institute For The Future

Featured in:

• Wired's Innovation Insights: "Personalized Prevention: Harnessing Technology Catalysts for Change"
• Huffington Post: "Food at Work: Setting the Table for a Healthy Workforce"

In the next decade we have the opportunity to create a culture of health, transforming the art and science of health promotion and chronic disease prevention by strategically engaging with technology. The social and economic environment is ripe to put health at the center of human and economic vitality. And dynamic alliances of scientists, health professionals, entrepreneurs and neighborhoods are poised to lead the charge towards this culture of health.

IFTF partnered with the Vitality Institute (@VitalityInst) to map how technologies, which will change our lives in ways difficult to imagine, may be catalysts to health and well-being between now and 2030. Use this map to inspire coordinated innovation across sectors, with workers, with community groups to use technology to catalyze health.

How can orchestrated hardware reduce excess alcohol consumption? How can augmented reality help us quit smoking? How can artificial intelligence help us eat better?

This map explores those questions and more, telling stories of the future, a culture of health in 2030, brought about by technologies, lean iteration, bottom-up networks of humans and machines, connected science, and aligning businesses with social interest.

Find yourself in the future forces. Get inspired by the technology catalysts, and the risk factors to our health that hold the key to improving human and economic vitality. Imagine how you could help shape a culture of health in the future, and throw in your voice with the vitality commission’s recommendations to make this future a reality.

This map is the final result of a forecasting process that starts with diverse experts in technology, design, health promotion, policy, and gaming. You can explore those contributions in this annotated summary of the workshops that shaped the content of this map of the coming decades.

Gain insight to the research process

This map is the final result of a forecasting process that starts with diverse experts in technology, design, health promotion, policy, and gaming. Such experts have depth of understanding and experience, and many are working in the trenches to make a new future. In September and October 2013, we held two workshops that shaped the content of this map, which included participants like Michele Barry, Stanford School of Medicine Senior Associate Dean for Global Health, Clinical Psychologist and Intel Senior Researcher Margaret Morris, and Unity Stoakes, Founder and President of StartUP Health. You can explore the experts’ contributions in this annotated visual summary of the workshops.