One earmark of the disruptive change is that people don’t know they want it yet—the Mini-van and the Walkman are widely cited examples. So it was for the iPhone and the tablet. If Apple is to regain the disruptive-innovator mojo many critics feel it's lost, it needs to give people something else they didn’t know they wanted.
It needs a market that is huge; ripe for disruption; and noble. It needs to fit both Apple’s brand ambitions and its stock-market enthusiasm. Surprisingly, that isn't a smart watch. The watch is fine, but I think it's a baby-step towards a much bigger, more meaningful market.
Apple can build a prosthetic brain for the elderly.
Old age is big businessWe’re all living longer. Keeping us healthy and out of hospital saves money (by some estimates, 95% of the cost of hospital care.) Today’s working adults, which Pew Research calls the Sandwich Generation, are stuck between a youth that they continue to support after school, and parents living longer.
As Boomers enter their sunset years, their children—awash in a sea of technology—will want them to get connected. Unfortunately, my recent research into applications to help a group such as the sight-impaired read shows a fragmented set tools, inconsistent standards, and good intentions (some resources here.)
Room for innovation and disruptionIn 2009, women over 55 were the fastest-growing segment on Facebook. Older generations are keen to join the online world. But the technology they need isn’t the technology we’re making. Bigger fonts are not the answer; better anticipation is.
The problems are hard. They span design, machine learning, cognitive science, and medicine. Here are three functions that would be incredibly useful to someone with diminished senses, all of which are real products today:
- A smart, phone-assisted hearing aid that can respond to ambient sound levels and understand when you’re listening to music and when you’re in a conversation.
- A device that scans words in your field of view, then reads them to you carefully and clearly.
- An always-on camera that reminds you of who someone is when you see their face.
Usage is diagnosticsThe ways we’re finding to measure health from our pockets are astonishing. Take, for example, Asthmapolis (now Propeller Health), which attached GPS trackers to asthma inhalers to build a map of respiratory triggers and correlate it with city pollution.
There’s plenty more in the works, driven by the Quantified Self movement and backed by early adopters on Kickstarter, measuring everything from heart rate to blood pressure to blood sugar to body temperature to blood oxygen content to melanomas.
But it’s the inherent forms of sensing that, for me, hold the most promise. In the interactive age, when you watch something, it watches you back. Each time we unlock a phone, we’re performing a tiny cognitive test. The data exhaust of our everyday lives is grist for the analytical mill of healthcare:
- If our fingers waver, or we can’t remember the numbers properly, might it be a sign of early-onset dementia?
- If we press the back button more often when writing, are we making more mistakes?
- Does the angle of our phone, or the amount of eye movement during a video call, tell us something important about our health?
- Does less smiling or facial slackness indicate a minor stroke?
- Does the sound of a stream of urine correlate with prostate enlargement?
- Can we measure gait, and time of day, and infer health?
- Does the frequency of a toilet flushing, or the duration spent sitting still before that flush, predict other ailments?
A huge marketOn a more cynical—but necessary—front, the product would sell. It might sound callous to wrap high-minded ambitions in dollars, but if this kind of device is to work, it needs a million users, not only to fund its development, but also to crowdsource metrics and data from which to form a baseline. It needs some good old-fashioned greed.
Guilt alone would make this the top holiday item. Peer pressure—from house to house in retirement communities, from schoolyard to schoolyard with word of mouth—would do the rest.
In countries where healthcare is a social benefit, such devices might even get government support. Insurance companies would leap at the opportunity to save money and anticipate problems, and to better optimize scarce resources based on patient conditions. What’s more, telephone companies crave new markets, and theelderly and sick are an untapped opportunityfor them.
Bringing this to marketYou can’t just launch a product like this from nothing. Disruptive innovation requires baby steps: Netflix and postal DVDs; Twitter and SMS; Tesla and a sports car. Apple’s success today as a phone manufacturer owes as much to the App Store and the original iPod as it does to savvy marketing with AT&T or the availability of good broadband.
You'd first need to get a million people using a device that could sense the world around them it so you can build useful baselines. It would require a rich set of developer tools to get things rolling. It wouldn't hurt if you had some inside influence at the FDA.
You might even launch a watch.
Finally—it’s a great storyIf Apple were to launch such a product—part videoconferencing tool, part PDA, part diagnostic, part cognitive assistant, part hearing aid—it would change what it means to grow old. If anyone can build a prosthetic brain for aging humans, and make it cool, it’s them.
Imagine Tim Cook taking the stage, framing a gigantic problem, painting the solution in broad strokes, not a dry eye in the house.
It’s what Steve would have done.
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