Enabling mobile

Unlocking the potential of mobile technology

As a digital strategist, mobile forms one part of my job. It is not my specialty and I am certainly no developer. But the below conversation on Reddit encapsulates my thoughts quite perfectly:

“If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them about life today? — I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.” Nuseramed, Reddit

I suppose this extends to digital as a whole, but for the sake of this article I want to particularly focus on mobile technology and where the pockets of potential are most obvious and easily tapped — although undoubtedly there is overlap with wider digital throughout this piece.

Connection/Environment

The clearest, and currently most used, element to exploit is the sheer reach of smartphones and the potential to connect people globally and locally. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is the biggest winner from this and I think what started out as a race to connect everybody has evolved into connecting people based off defining features that can be rapidly judged — interests, location, etc. Hence, the huge popularity of apps like Tinder.

There are two applications to this: refining global information to connect us to local individuals and using global information to connect us to a local environment.

The first is obviously most easily demonstrated through Tinder. We are unable to digest or sift through the huge amount of data and people connected globally without in someway refining it. If we can very simply filter what or who we see based on our exact location, it enables us to get a more focused result. As with most of life, we are much more interested in things that are relevant to us.

The second is really just a pigeon step away from local individual connections, but uses mobile and the knowledge of the global digital mob to better connect us to our local environment — wherever we may be and however we may move. The principle behind this sits comfortably with travel applications of course, but extends quite beautifully to other uses, such as the blind. Third Eye is a gorgeous campaign that begins to demonstrate the potential of this kind of usage. And we must consider how we can push this even further.

Simplicity

In my work, the campaigns that have failed horribly, are those that have a time-intensive step. By identifying the rate-determining step (RDS), we can of course try and tackle them, but the key takeaway for me, is that anything convoluted is going to struggle to naturally succeed, regardless of how valuable the end output is.

Originally, this was the registration step, every set-up wanted all your information and it wanted it up front. But between functionality such as ‘express buy’ and the ability to use the log-in credentials of other more universally used applications e.g. Twitter or Facebook, we have practically nullified this RDS.

So when we look at connecting to our environment through apps like ThirdEye, surely the next step must be in supplementing active input with the push of automatic information. Which, I imagine, is the thinking behind iBeacons. Perhaps this is just in advertising, but there seems to be a big gap between instantly going from offline engagement to online engagement. I need a mechanism to immediately connect with what I am seeing that isn't a bloody QR code or the equivalent of Blippar. NFC certainly has all the potential to do this, but despite years of promise, hasn't taken off. I refuse to believe that with all the advances in mobile technology, I still have to manually enter a URL code.

The iBeacon is definitely close, but a more ubiquitous and system-agnostic mechanism, that is preferably smaller and cheaper would revolutionise the way we interact with our environment. This must be on the radars of Apple and Google, with their advancement of Spotlight in iOS8 and Google’s image search. But at the moment, the best we can do is a short URL and some distinct search keywords.

Health

By far the most usable attribute of mobile is that it is the most personable of all technologies. We have it with us at virtually every step of the day. It wakes us up, it schedules our meetings, it maps out our journeys — which is exactly why it excels at connecting us to other people, to our environment and also why it is so convenient.

But the other thing about omnipresent mobiles, it that it makes it incredibly adept at tracking ourselves. Since the birth of Big Data we have become fanatical about our personal data — we devour stats about how much we eat, how many calories we burn, how many hours we sleep. We can’t get enough of it. Which inevitably spawned the peripheral/wearable.

Where this needs to go in the future lies in the collaboration between industries — specifically, healthcare, mobile technology and fitness. We must push personal data beyond simply tracking the movement of single limbs into the prediction and flagging of disease. Ideally, this would all be wrapped up in one little package, but there is certainly the potential for plug-ins and peripherals.

What the collaboration of industries enables is the expert analysis on top of the data. Sleepio, featured at Wired Health is an excellent example of this, taking the data we capture from a peripheral and mobile application and distil relevant health information out the back. Neurotrack, another technology at Wired Health, is also looking at how it can be translated into the mobile environment.

Since I started to write this article, we had the much anticipated announcement of Apple Health, with a name check for NikeFuel — suddenly elucidating the crucial reason for Nike’s withdrawal from the peripheral market. And with the mention that HealthKit will be collaborating with healthcare providers to deliver up-to-date information on patient vitals in real time, this collaboration is really promising (and also means I can delete a couple of paragraphs out of this blog).

Making an assumption that we can expect an Apple periphery to be released soon-ish, we can hope for a consolidation of hardware and focus on software. The exciting opportunity for this software lies not in reporting real-time but predicting ahead of time — hence my mention of Neurotrack earlier. If we can combine connection/environment, simplicity and health we begin to get to the pinnacle of mobile possibilities. IBM’s Watson behaves more like a human than a computer to help doctors diagnose patients and identify the most effective treatment option based off predictions, perspectives and frankly, in my limited knowledge, magic.

Beyond this, what if I could use mobile technology to track my daily data, without needing to manually input it myself, I am (and potentially my doctor) then pushed notifications to tell me that I should be screened for disease X or switched to treatment Y based off the comparison of my stats or change in stats compared to previously collected data of the global population refined by gender, age, genetic makeup, comorbidities, overall health etc. This predictive data-set is continuously updated (anonymously of course) — meaning the accuracy of prediction continuously improves. Not only would this be brilliant, it would propel us into a whole new healthcare paradigm in which we predict and prevent disease rather than simply react to it.

Cat Videos

But of course with all of this, we also need to recognise the other key use of mobiles — time-filling. As we mentioned, mobiles are phenomenally personable and on us at all moments. And with this comes a need to relax, no one wants to be switched on 24/7. There are times when a cat video or other such mindless activities are everything we could possibly want because they let us enter cruise control. They let us switch off on our commute to work or in the ten minutes before a hospital appointment. So whatever the future for mobile technology holds, the dreaded cat video will likely continue to play a part!

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