The Sencil of the Alfred E. Man Institute for Biomedical Engineering is a hair-thin biosensor. Its extremely sensitive tip is fastened in a blood vessel with a flexible fiberglass thread and sticks out of the skin like a normal hair. By attaching measuring devices you can, for example, measure the glucose concentration (video demonstration).

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Everywhere in our bodies we’ll build sensors which are in permanent contact with the outside world. This way brands can react to us directly. If our heart rate rises when we see a new bikini the brand will know they’re on the right track. That’s another interpretation of ‘listening to your customer’!

Google has invested in several DNA-research centres. These centres offer paid services in which they analyse your DNA and present it to you in online reports. The test results of your show if you have a genetic chance of medical conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer or rheumatoid arthritis.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Such a service is useful to us worried consumers. It also fits in the tendency that we as consumers take matters in our own hands more. In the future we’ll be our own specialists and we’ll be able to make our own diagnoses. In combination with the indexation by Google we’ll have no more secrets. Getting turned down on your first job interview, based on your DNA, supermarkets with specific departments for Altzheimer’s patients or insurance companies that decide if you get a policy based on a simple Google search. It seems far away, but with this the first steps have been taken.

Related trends

• Coaching brands

The Dutch health care provider Meavita Nederland offers Care from a Distance, clients receive care via images and sound, supported by measured data such as blood sugar levels. With Care from a Distance a consultation with a doctor or other medical professional can take place at a distance via television or a broadband connection. Care providers can monitor clients at a distance and support them via home electronics and telemedicine (ITC care services). The client provides the care provider with data such as blood pressure, ecg and weight.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

We are more regularly receiving all sorts of services from a distance. Soon we will pay for these sorts of services by the minute just like we pay for the telephone, and/or on the basis of a subscription. This does not only apply to care. Soon, if there is a leak in our kitchen cupboard, we will be able to use our home coaching brand to get immediate assistance by pointing a camera at the problem, we will then receive advice and will be able to contact the right person with the right tools to come and fix the problem. Or, if we are having trouble with our piano exercises brands will be ready to assist us at home.

The WII Balance Board is a sort scale that can accurately determine where you put pressure on it. Apart from all kinds of fitness exercises, the Board also makes it possible to train your balance (fc).

Promoting balance in mind and body is not a short contemporary hype, not a trend like 'we are going to play games again', but a very long term trend. This trend however is only beginning, and will only further develop after the world economy has come to balance, we can hardly speak of low wage countries, and the automizing and robotizing trends have allowed us to work less. We then will finally have the time to structurally work on ourselves. We will then be able to do things we now consider 'inexplicable', as 'magic', or supra natural. It will take some time, I am talking about 2050, but the first products to help us in this are now introduced. And these are just brands again.

Through HealthVault consumers can maintain their medical records online, and get access to medical knowledge and health suppliers. Patients, people who are ill, can connect drivers like diabetes and pulse meters, and thus get better advise. HealthVault, an initiative of Microsoft, is very careful when it comes to privacy. The electronic health records that patients and their families can share with doctors is completely secured and decoded (em, Dutch). Thus health coaching brands come to life. Now as an initiative of a software company. In the future health coaching brands will especially employ people who 'breathe health'. This is a small step in that direction.