In 2035, your Apple Watch Series 36 could arrive with enough battery power to last the lifetime of the wearable; I’m talking years rather than days, i.e., no recharging required.
Don’t like wearing a watch? All those holistic sensors may come in an assortment of new forms, including flexible and near-invisible stick-on ‘smart patches’ that look kind of like a Band-Aid but stay put for weeks or even months.
As the speed in which health data can be processed and analysed continues to improve, while physical holistic sensors get tinier and tinier, keeping tabs on your vitals ten years from now will likely not be handled by one piece of dedicated wearable tech, but by an array of health-sensing devices you don’t even have to think about, like the steering wheel of your car if you commute by automobile, your contact lenses (even if you don’t require corrective vision), or even the waistband of your favorite underpants.
With so much information to decipher, AI will be the backbone that powers future wearable wellness technology. The promise of early detection of not just chronic disease but everyday illness will be another crucial selling point of tomorrow’s wearable devices, and the best devices will offer sensible, actionable steps to follow if something does come up.
To get a clearer picture of our possible wearable/embeddable future, I spoke with an array of experts and industry leaders in the field, including, Angela McIntyre, the director of the Stanford’s Wearable Electronics Initiative; Amaury Kosman, the founder and CEO of the smart ring brand, Circular; Jason Russell, the vice president of software at Oura Ring; Antoine Joussain, a lead product manager at the consumer health technology brand, Withings; Roman Axelrod and Dr Valentyn Volkov, cofounders of the smart contact lens startup Xpanceo; and Michael Hayes, the CEO of the smart contact startup InWith Corp.
These conversations resulted in five major trends surrounding wearables and embeddables for the year 2035: More form factors, batteries that last the life of the device, predictive monitoring for both chronic diseases and everyday conditions, AI connecting the dots between wellness metrics and healthcare, and further incorporation of smart features that make life easier/less stressful.
