Wearables becoming Implants.

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This is the fourth of our new weekly strategic series of Top Ten Strategic Anticipations for 2025 – 2030. Topic number three, Demographics, Xenophobia, Racism: Innovation papering over cracks, can be found here: https://lnkd.in/gQVTthHy
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This year, shipments of wearables – products such as bands, rings, watches, earbuds, smart glasses – are forecast to reach well over 500 million units, with global revenue estimated to be potentially over 100 billion dollars.
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Small items, big business.
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This is a fast-moving, innovative, and growing market around the world – projected to grow in double digits between now and 2030.
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Today wearable gadgets bring useful capabilities such as connectivity, health tracking, payments, and navigation – though like any digital device they can also be distracting with constant notifications demanding your attention.
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In the 1960s while teaching at MIT, mathematician and professor Edward Thorp invented the first wearable computer – a device to predict the outcome of roulette rounds.
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The following decade saw the proliferation of digital wristwatches; then in the early 2000s Bluetooth-enabled devices such as wireless headsets become popular.
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The years between 2025-2030 will see your wearables sprout more advanced features, be smaller, last longer, and – ultimately – turn into implants.
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The ancient Chinese were fashioning dental implants from bamboo pegs around 4000 years ago.
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The first clinically successful cardiac pacemaker was implanted in 1960 – naturally and rightfully the public was initially sceptical; today patients are far less anxious about having such a device implanted in them.
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Today many might leave their wallet or purse at home if carrying our mobile phone (which has effectively now become a digital umbilical cord); imagine if before long you could be free from even having to carry that as you go about your business.
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Come 2030, a future skin-friendly implant – even as straightforward as perhaps under a fingernail – can easily and discreetly offer many of the capabilities of the wearables of today.
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It will allow you to track your sleep accurately, rather than charging your wearable wellness device for the following day.
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It can act as your access device into locations in tandem with geofencing: useful for shared offices, banks, or military installations.
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The period 2025-2030 will see huge progress in Human-Computer Interfaces (HCI), improving quality of life for many disabled or injured patients.
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During this period, smart glasses will be a much lower friction way to increase the accessibility of Spatial Computing capabilities such as Augmented Reality.
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Wearables becoming Implants doesn’t mean turning into a cyborg or The Six Million Dollar Man – at least not before 2030.
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Next up in our strategic series of Top Ten Anticipations for 2025 – 2030 is titled "Augmented Reality and the impact on mobile devices" - available Monday 25th November.

Invention, ingenuity, innovation: though not always premeditated, tech has a knack of finding a way to make us progress forward.

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Even - or perhaps especially - when times are truly crap.
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By the late 1800s, large cities all around the world were drowning in horse manure.
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Removing horse droppings from the streets was the greatest obstacle to urban development at the turn of the century.
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Thus came The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.
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That same year, a newspaper predicted that, in 50 years time, every street in London would be buried under nearly three metres of manure.
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The population of other large cities, such as New York, were also blighted by the same practical affliction.
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The root cause was that in order for cities to function, equine was the main form of transportation - for people and products alike.
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By some estimates there may have been up to 50,000 horses in London by the late nineteenth century - New York may have had double that.
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An average horse weighs around 500kg; in a day, it might produce >20kg of manure.
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Working hard did little for the life expectancy of the animals; corpses were also unable to be removed.
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The best remedial efforts of urban planners were nixed by the conundrum that the very thing needed to move large amounts of material, horses, would in doing so produce - literally - more of the natural problem.
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No solution was found for years - residents were seemingly doomed.
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Rain turned the streets into manure rivers, and dry weather turned the deposits into dust; when whipped up by the wind it choked pedestrians and coated buildings.
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As any resource becomes more costly...humans will creatively find alternatives.
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Salvation unexpectedly came in automotive form: cars, buses, trucks, and trams.
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Proving that necessity is the mother of invention, the proliferation of these novel remedies gradually made horse-powered movement redundant.
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Once the financial tipping-point was reached where owning a vehicle was cheaper than running a horse, economics took care of the rest.
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The number of cars sold in the USA rose from 4,192 per year in 1900, to 356,000 in 1912.
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By 1912, motorised vehicles (both electric and petrol-powered, as today) were the main medium of transportation and carriage.
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Obviously in modern times vehicles have brought about their own challenges for the urban environment, and our planet more generally.
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History might not repeat, but it demonstrably does rhyme.
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Time and again we have seen that existing business structures can be rapidly replaced in unexpected ways by invention, ingenuity, and innovation.
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Sooner or later, something fundamental in your business world will change - are you ready?
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One of the reasons to be optimistic for the coming future that, in the face of considerable challenges around the world, we have previously overcome seemingly insurmountable problems with unexpected solutions.

Keep your eyes on the prize: it could be quite the spectacle!

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2025 may see Smart Glasses really break out into the mainstream.
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They allow the wearer to dynamically interact with their surroundings in rich contemporary ways.
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For example, hands-free operation to take photos or record video, as well as using voice commands to recognise objects, provide assistance for map directions, or read and translate foreign language in real-time audio.
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All part of the wider shift of our wearables digital companions becoming more sophisticated and discreet, as the first piece in this Email unpacked.
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This is due to the convergence of several emerging technologies maturing, including advanced batteries which prolong usage and allow for smaller form factors, plus integration with on-board Artificial Intelligence (AI).
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Previous piece on Solid State Batteries (SSBs): https://lnkd.in/gFeXY2BG​
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Chinese tech titan Baidu this week revealed a new pair of smart glasses, expected to hit the market next year.
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Equipped with cameras to capture images and footage, it also supports voice interactions via its built-in AI assistant ERNIE.
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In development since 2019, the company also stated that the ERNIE platform now handles 1.5 billion user queries and interactions daily, a significant uptick from the 200 million daily requests reported in May.
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It was recently reported that Amazon is developing innovative smart specs for its delivery drivers - with the aim to make them more efficient by guiding them to, around, and within buildings.
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Given how many packages are delivered, even savings of seconds could add up - plus rather than holding a device, hands would be free to carry even more boxes (or push a cart).
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Eventually, they might spell the end for ubiquitous wireless headphones.
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Audio specs post: https://lnkd.in/gJmExhx9​
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This convergence of fashion and function not only exemplifies the cutting edge of technology but also underscores the growing trend of digital wearables that enhance our daily lives in unprecedented ways.
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This is a broader shift towards digital wearables that seamlessly augment our senses and capabilities, redefining how we interact with technology and each other.
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In time, Augmented Reality (AR) will also become part of this revolutionary repertoire: blending the physical and digital seamlessly has the potential to unlock truly transformative capabilities.
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AR specs post: https://lnkd.in/gHYy4_dB​
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Keep your eyes peeled for more soon!

Cancer Digital Twins.

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"The big C" is is one of the biggest health challenges worldwide.
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Per Our World in Data​, as of 2021 around 15% of all mortalities were cancer deaths (estimated to be around 10 million), making it one of the most common causes of death globally.
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As the global population grows larger and older, the number of cancer cases has also increased (cancer risks rise steeply with age).
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This is due to a number of contributory factors: as we age our cells accumulate more DNA damage, which increases the chances of mutations that can lead to cancer.
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In addition, simple life wear-and-tear results in the immune system also weakening with age, which makes it harder to identify and eliminate abnormal cells before they can multiply and spread.
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Around the world, we spend billions of dollars on developing new cancer treatments: some will turn out to be successful, but most will not.
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Researchers have now created digital twins of individual patients, testing out different drugs to predict which one would be most effective against the type of cancer they have.
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A digital twin is a virtual model of a real-world object, system, or process that can be used for simulation, testing, monitoring, and maintenance.
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Amazingly, the technology, called "FarrSight-Twin", is based on algorithms used by astrophysicists to discover black holes.
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FarrSight-Twin is applied to large amounts of molecular and patient data, enabling the integration of disparate oncology datasets into a single, holistic model of patient response.
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It comes from a collaboration between researchers from Concr​, ​The Institute of Cancer Research​, ​Durham University​, and ​The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust​.
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Each digital twin is created from biological data from thousands of patients with cancer who have been treated in different ways.
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This information is combined to recreate the cancer of a real patient with molecular data on their tumour; this digital twin makes it possible to predict how a patient is likely to respond to a treatment.
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Digital trials accurately predicted the outcome of the actual clinical trials in all simulated clinical studies, with treatment predicted by FarrSight-Twin having a 75% response rate.
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Patients in these trials had either breast, pancreatic, or ovarian cancer.
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As well as using digital twins to represent individual patients, clinical trial cohorts can be built to compare treatments to see if they are likely to be successful.
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Though still early days, ultimately in the future it might mean that patients could have different treatments tested on their digital twin to select the most suitable treatment ahead of time - resulting in better health outcomes.
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As part of the move towards more personalised medicine, in the future medical treatment for every patient may be informed by accurate insights into their individual responses to existing and experimental therapies.

"We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work".

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This quote comes from Thomas A. Edison.
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As 2024 looms towards a close, organisations are rightly reviewing performance during the past year - and how that influences future plans.
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Senior business leaders are consistently saying that investments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) have largely disappointed so far, failing to deliver the expected business value.
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The AI hype train is running out of steam, pulling into "Underwhelmed".
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At events and conferences, those pushing all-things-AI as being effective business tools to increase efficiency and productivity are providers: both the global tech hyperscalers and ambitiously valued local startups.
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The absence of end-user firms who can demonstrate real business value directly derived from Gen AI-related change projects is sorely lacking.
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This is not a problem, per-se, of the underlying technology.
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The root cause is people: both those hawking, and the buyers.
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Gen AI has been overhyped by sales and marketing types: too much potential promised, too little kinetic crystalised.
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Organisations have been sold Large Language Model (LLM) services as a short-cut, when in reality there are none (garbage in, garbage out).
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On the customer side, companies are simply not prepared to do the hard yards when it comes to strategic data quality work.
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The vast majority of Gen AI projects have not seen positive Return On Capital Employed (ROCE); though much has been spent, little tangible business value has materialised.
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Business leaders are now more apathetic on what LLMs can do for their organisation in the short-term.
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This is especially true with 2025 and the coming years bringing about much in the way of uncertainty; companies are prioritising change to bring about confidence and certitude rather than "cool".
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Gen AI, as it stands, is economically unproductive - and during the next year we shall see significant market corrections as reality bites on the hype train which always runs out of puff when things go uphill.
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It's not coincidental that Gartner has recently placed Gen AI as being on the cusp of the "Trough of Disillusionment" (where interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver).
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Gen AI is noted as now within this area of the fabled Hype Cycle Research Methodology for both the 2024 Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence and also the 2024 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.
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Longer-term, AI will broadly form part of our future digital fabric - but we must recognise that no technology - emerging or mature - is a panacea.
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As Edison, one of the most prolific inventors of all time, observed - there is no substitute for hard graft and no quick bypass to arrive at success.
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The tech behind Gen AI is not the reason for it failing to live up to its promise and being in danger of becoming derailed before long.