In 2006, TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year was “You.” It was recognition of the global surge in online sharing of personal experiences fueled by our participation at YouTube, Wikipedia, and other social platforms.
My prediction for 2014 is that “You” will once again reign as the most influential being, driven by our interest for collecting, calculating, and consuming our own personal data.
At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, wearable tech is a big theme among exhibitors. Everything from the Mimo onesie that lets parents monitor their baby’s health to a smart jacket with GPS that helps you navigate a route via vibrations in the shoulders indicating where to turn.
Want to monitor the quality of your kid’s teeth cleaning? There’s a toothbrush that tracks their efforts and reports the data to your smartphone. Need to improve your sleep? There’s a headband that tracks your sleep and wakes you when you achieved optimal rest. According to NPR’s All Tech Considered, Consumer Electronics Association senior researcher Ken Tillman stated the market for wearables could reach $1.2 billion in 2014.
Trends with life logging and fitness trackers were early drivers that helped power a passion for looking at our own personal data. The power behind that personal data crunching can be found in the cloud.
In the cloud, our personal” big data” is stored and analyzed. And thanks to the cloud we can access the insights from our big data anytime and from anywhere. A study commissioned last year by Rackspace indicates cloud-powered wearable tech like Google Glass are giving rise to the “Human Cloud” where our data is connected to a network of devices that share insights in real time.
What’s your prediction for 2014? What will be the next frontier for wearable tech? And do you have any concerns about having this data in the cloud? Join the #CloudPredictions conversation and share your forecast by using the hashtag.
Image from iWink and Mashable
Follow Debbie on Twitter at @DebCM
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