Products I’m Waiting For in Futurestan i1

Futurestan is my point of view on future products. I study huge problems and try to find simple but effective solutions. Here is a first short story on a pretty huge problem — “How AI-connected home might become a healthcare-oriented system”.

A photo from “How to prevent the Apple HomePod from staining your furniture” by Andrew Hoyle/CNET

Smart home solutions have become something customary for families. These products have been effectively integrated into a habitual order of things now. They are fair, cheap, and rich enough in a sense of a user experience (UX). That is why seed and scaling stages are changed by a blitz-scaling using really big distribution channels like Amazon is. It hasn’t been the first case ever. Everybody knows Google x Nest Labs and Samsung x SmartThings deals.

Petcube Play, Interactive Wi-Fi Pet Camera by Petcube

This concept is rapidly growing with the new use cases. While Nest, August, BuddyGuard, SmartThings continue to focus on security and alarming, some products like Petcube, CherryHome, and Lighthouse pursue a smart care. As The Verge wrote, “It also seems super useful if you have an elderly parent or grandparent who lives alone and you’d like the peace of mind that comes with knowing you can get alerts if the camera doesn’t seem movement”. Care solutions are growing fast. It’s cute — they’ve verified on pets.

Here is a huge niche on the market. There is a well-known fact that an unhealthy lifestyle is the main cause of diseases at least in 60–70 percent of cases, according to the WHO. It is a scourge of modern times. Only 5–10% of all cancer cases can be attributed to genetic defects, whereas the remaining 90–95% have their roots in the environment and lifestyle. Something similar is observed in a scope of the eyes diseases, like a near-sightedness (myopia).

Weed need a deep shift from a smart control to a smart care in consumer IoT paradigm, a photo by BusinessWire

Of the 7.3 billion people in the world today, 63 percent are considered to be in need of a vision correction. The lifestyle factors include cigarette smoking, diet (fried foods, red meat), alcohol, sun exposure, environmental pollutants, infections, stress, obesity, and physical inactivity. By 2020, approximately 15 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed. More than 2.1 billion people — nearly 30 percent of the global population — are overweight.

Oh yeah, we need something just like this. Something like a smart camera with a design of HomePod, analysing a people’s lifestyle at home

Cancer, diabetes, and heart disease are responsible for 1.1 trillion dollars in lost productivity in the United States. So the idea is very simple. We need home AI interfaces that care about people having superfluous uninterrupted binge-watching (to prevent eyes and spine diseases). The healthcare guard who supervises the unhealthy habits and notifies of dangerous consequences. It’s time to give our children a chance to prevent scoliosis, diabetes et cetera.