Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1053050
NOVEMBER 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 29 chart, but it's going there because by analyz- ing the signals the body puts out, you are able to infer quite a few things. I believe the two niche markets that will go first into IoB are kids and seniors—the two extremes. For example, I'd be very happy to see what my mom is doing right now. She's back home in Romania. Yes, I talk to her every second or third day, but it would be interesting to know, "Did she fall? What is her heart rate? How is her well-being?" If you can character- ize that in a word, it would be the signals. I believe seniors might want to take it because, for example, I tried to convince her to have such a device to see what happens. The second one is the kids. I like to know what my monkeys are doing and if they are fine. The problem with this thing is that it opens a new era of privacy. It's a new meaning because you can be hacked. Two weeks ago, there was a Bloomberg Businessweek maga- zine story with what happened to Apple and Amazon, and that's another story. Now we are overwhelmed because somebody can find these things out about you. If not for bad rea- sons—for lack of better words—then for life insurance. You have your whole life in a data center somewhere. There is still time until this becomes a real- ity. I'm still concerned about my privacy. I'm not doing anything special or wrong, but I'm still concerned. If I look at my daughters, they don't care; they post everything everywhere— it doesn't matter. With this approach, if you give it to kids first, they will grow up and, as adults, will say, "Sure. I'd like to know what happened to my heartbeat in the last 24 hours." It's another approach. Johnson: Not only do we have the possibility of invasiveness around data privacy, but IoB starts to touch on a number of different ways of connecting to the body. Botos: IoB would become successful the moment you forget you have that attachment. Today, it's still bulky. You still have to put it on, pull it off at night, and eventually charge it. That is still a threshold that many people have to go above or surpass to accept the tech- nology. The moment it touched your skin, like a sticker, you could forget about it. You could have it there for weeks, months, or even more, and you wouldn't have to do anything. You could shower and maybe even swim. That will be a true application for IoB. Johnson: Do you see IoB moving into implant- ables? Botos: Yes. It's already there. Johnson: I could easily see a pacemaker doing something like that or an implantable blood sugar monitor. Botos: Yes. The other class I was talking about besides patches is implantables. I saw it last year at the Wearable Technologies Conference in San Francisco where you could have a glass- based encapsulated pill if you want. It's a near- field communication (NFC) tag that you put under your skin, and from that moment, you can start paying with your hand. You can iden- tify yourself to a tag or a door: "Yes, I am Titu. Here I am." That's a completely different class. It has a higher class in the medical industry because it has to survive inside your body and should have as little of an effect on your body as possible. The first implant I saw was encap- sulated in medical-grade sterile glass. The other class of IoB devices would be the ingestible ones. You swallow it as a pill, and it has two purposes. First, it's sensor-based as in it goes, stays in your body for about 24 hours or so, and it collects data as it travels through your digestive tract. You have a receiver on your body somewhere very close because the energy is low like a patch. It transmits that, and when it goes out, it's basically disposable. The other scope for this digestible would be to deliver drugs to the right place. Yes, inva- sively entering the bloodstream is one way— the old way; for example, with something like insulin, we cannot have it as a pill. There have been hundreds of trials where they try to con- vert insulin into a pill so you can take a pill instead of taking a shot every time you need it.