Have you been tracking your health, steps or exercises with a wearable device such as an Apple Watch or Fitbit? Have even been in a "steps" contest with friends (or strangers) as a motivator to achieve better health?
While initially motivating you might also be a little bored of your fitness tracker. Doesn't it do something else? Can I give this information to my doctor? Would my path to improved (or unimproved) health help a friend? What else can we accomplish with these devices?
After following digital health, wearable, smart home / automation / smart city technologies and performing my own work in large scale technological instrumentation, here is my attempt to show a mapping as to how all these devices can fit together. We have the starting data to help us understand and improve ourselves, others and the environment we live in if only we assemble it.
For this diagram, I generalized the human/biological interactions and applied wearable based sensor technology with ecosystem-based sensors. An example of a wearable based sensor would be a device like a Fitbit. An example of a sensor that we typically would not wear would be a weather station or a radar speed sign.
Present day we often interact in a "one on many" relationship with our various sensors to help us understand the world around us and what effect it might be having on us. We are also typically left on our own to interpret the data we are presented with and depending out our cognitive state we might not understand the data or worse yet misinterpret it.
Enter the potential of machine learning technology. With personal and shared data from many sources, we all can be in a better world. Imagine your heart rate monitor data guiding you to an optimal exercise for the day by pre-selecting exercise intensity from your sleep quality while providing the best locations based on weather, air quality data, and popularity.
This example isn't hard to imagine because all the data is available just not personalized for you yet. The results for you would be more time focused on what you want to do with a better measured (and validated) benefit to your health.
The augmented human future is coming and with a little effort and assembly we can move from data / decision overload to a healthier and happier human.