B is for Biosense
Biosense describes the fact that every organism is in permanent exchange with the environment. It represents a new model of ecological design that is aware and alive. For example, think of a plant’s stomata, located on the underside of its leaves. It is sensitive to environmental cues and reacts as a gateway to supply water and nutrients or, in conditions such as drought, it closes tightly to prevent dehydration. Moving forward, objects will biosense, they will be able to detect and monitor invisible substances and apparently nonsensible phenomenon to give people on-demand control of their health and environments. For instance, one of the new features on the iPhone 3.0 update is LifeScan, from Johnson & Johnson Co., which monitors glucose levels through a Bluetooth enabled blood testing device allowing users to make insulin-adjustments. Or imagine a mobile that uses technology developed by Gentag, Inc. that can detect pollen in the air, and since it knows you’re allergic, instruct an alternative route for safe-passage home. Or a car with a carbon meter that indicates the toxin level that’s spewing out from its tail pipe. And then there’s emotion recognition technology. Toyota, working with Stanford University and Affective Media, has designed a car that reads your feelings so when you’re stressed, it responds by cooling the inside climate and plays your favorite music so you can chill out. And to prevent accidents due to road rage, its headlights change colors to indicate the driver’s mood. While right now, sound is made visible in the form of captions or voiced descriptions for the hearing impaired, in the future there will be advanced transduction mechanisms that transform one sense into another. For instance, we all know we feel euphoric when exercising, which is a side-effect of certain endorphins and hormones, and although we can detect the feeling, imagine if there were detectors paying attention to these types of signaling and chemicals that are important for your health or monitoring your state of mind. These feedback loops, where people will become informed about their state of well-being, is a sense that we don’t have right now, but will be artificially created.