Next week we’ll see the future. The immediate future, that is. Hundreds of technology companies will convene for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, where they’ll unveil their latest contraptions and inventions. There’s so much going on that it takes a full-time reader to keep up with all the releases — and that doesn’t even cover demonstrations and keynotes. We’ll surely see some new technologies that build on past ones and make our lives a little simpler (and more fun to boot). It has me wondering how far we are from a huge step forward in how smartphones affect our lives.
What I’m looking for is a signal that smartphones will start to act as meters for our lives. For a quick analogy, we can look to the evolution of SCADA — supervisory control and data acquisition. Basically, SCADA takes a whole ton of information and then analyzes it, outputting it to users for human action. Telecom companies use SCADA systems to determine where their networks are out or running poorly. The SCADA system lets them know this information and how critical it is to the network’s functioning. Users can then determine a course of action to remedy the situation.
Of course, SCADA systems weren’t always advanced. As with all technologies, they started as something smaller. First they’d simply identify irregularities in network performance. This could be for a telecommunications network, electric grid, water pipes, or any of a dozen other critical, networked services. While the systems are greatly detailed now, they’re obviously far superior to the first ones that appeared in the 60s. In the same way our smartphones now are far smarter than the ones that we used in the mid-00s, and they stand to get plenty stronger in the coming years. We’re already starting to see the building blocks.
What you’ll see at CES is a bunch of companies unveiling their latest smartphones and tablets, and they’ll be more powerful than ever. Quad core processor will be a buzz term at the event. You’ll hear of mobile processors running at 1.5GHz or more. And that’s just in January of this year. By the end of 2012 it’s not inconceivable to imagine mobile processors approaching 2GHz. They are getting closer and closer to current laptop processing power, which will allow them to do more than ever. Getting them to monitor situations in our lives will only improve matters.
We’re already starting to see some isolated bits of greater smartphone integration. Home appliances such as washer and dryers are starting to come with WiFi chips. Soon enough we’ll see microwave and conventional ovens equipped with them. Thermostats seem like a logical extension, too. If we can control these functions from our smartphones, we can have an easier time with everything. We can start cooking dinner before we get home. We can start a washer load to time out with our arrival, so we can change over the load immediately. We can have the thermostat crank up (or down) shortly before we arrive, giving us a pleasant environment without wasting too much energy. The possibilities are great, and that’s just a home appliance example.
Imagine if we can get our smartphones to constantly measure bodily function. Blood sugar too low? You’ll get an alert. Heart rate running a bit too high? Not properly rested? Not enough of a certain nutrient in your system? All of this can conceivably be on the horizon. It won’t come out at CES 2012, and it might not come out at CES 2014. But it’s something that’s on the horizon. And that’s pretty damn exciting.
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