Innovation in Wearable Computing

Steve Jobs, the legendary founder of Apple, said in one of his lectures, “Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it.  You can influence it.  You can build your own things, that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

Leaving aside philosophical arguments and so on, this is in fact an excellent example of thinking “out of the box.”

To not make assumptions, to not get drawn into dogmas, to ask “why?”. For anything, even the most trivial or obvious, the next step has to be “disruptive innovation,” the kind that creates new markets, new worlds, rejecting convention and changing reality.

There are many examples of this in history, of products that changed entire industries, but it is as a result of the many changes in industry that we have computers, sensors, servers, development tools, and learning tools, all of them available to everyone.

The invention of modern printing influenced the way in which we read texts. The transition to computers initially only imitating the workings of the typewriter. Over the hundreds of years from the invention of printing to our own day, the way in which we read books has not changed.

Recently, Spritz decided to try to find a way in which we could absorb text faster, with an eye to the trend toward wearable computers, which are limited by screen size. The company developed a mechanism that replaces words automatically, with emphasis on those letters that allows the brain to decode the word faster. And the result? See for yourselves.

In the same context, I would mention a company called 1910 Design & Communication, who have come up with a redesign of the e-mail mailbox, to allow easier reading and writing.

These days, we store an enormous amount of data in the “cloud,” in light of its accessibility, simplicity and effectiveness, but is this how we will continue to store data in years to come? Has the data disk really gone “past its expiry date”?

Sony and Panasonic have announced a new project, “Archival Disk,” optical disks with a 300GB capacity, which in the coming years are expected to grow to capacities of 500GB and 1TB. All of the data that will be produced from the devices that we carry on us will have to be stored somewhere, and high capacity disks may be an answer.

But you don’t have to go too far forward in time. Following the success of the movie Back to the Future 2, in which there were shoes that laced themselves, Nike announced that a shoe with that capability would be on the market the following year. Wearable computing is about to change our lives as well.

Albert Einstein said: “The world that we created is a product of our way of thinking. This world cannot be changed if we do not change our way of thinking.”

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