Читать книгу Tech Trends in Practice - Бернард Марр, Bernard Marr - Страница 37

It all started with smart watches and fitness trackers. These now commonplace wearable devices are designed to help us lead healthier lives – and research suggests it actually works. One study found that participants with an Apple Watch linked to health and life insurance reward schemes increased their activity levels by a third, potentially amounting to an extra two years’ life expectancy.³ Smart watches also now have the ability to spot heart problems; the Apple Watch Series 5 has the ability to take an ECG, recording your heartbeat and rhythm in the same way as a hospital machine would, and is considered an approved medical device by the United States’ Food and Drug Administration.⁴

Soon, capabilities like this will be par for the course for all smart watches, fitness trackers, and other smart devices. But there are many other exciting (and occasionally downright weird) advances to get to grips with the world of wearables, from smart clothes, to technology that physically augments the human body, to the eventual merging of the human brain with computers.

Let’s take a look at each category in turn.