Wearables will increasingly use AI, say techies

OTTAWA — Those in the wearables industry envision the day when their products are taking less direction from humans and doing more thinking for themselves — in other words, incorporating more artificial intelligence (AI). “We’re moving from this time where we manually created the Internet," Tom Emrich, organizer for the organization known as We Are Wearables, said during an event held in Ottawa Tuesday. "What we’re doing now is waking things up in this age of awareness. "We’re now calling these things that we have smart things, but they’re not smart. That’s a big misconception. They’re not smart things, they’re awake things. The smart things are going to come next." Emrich said wearable technology, for the most part, still does what we tell it to do. However, he said most who are part of this industry dream of wearables connecting with the Internet of Things (IoT), “where your pantry talks to your fridge talks to your wearable talks to your doorbell and then to your drone, which delivers your groceries to come fit your specific needs.” He said wearables are already "changing our relationship to technology. We're making it so that we don't have to manually reflect the physical world in the digital world. It's automatically happening. Our sensors that we are wearing are persistently collecting information, sending it through the Internet. ... It's closing the separation gap between us and the technology." Emrich said technology could advance to the point where our social-network accounts are updated based what our wearables detect about us. Len MacEachern, CEO of GestureLogic Inc., an Ottawa-based maker of wearable fitness technology, said during an interview Tuesday that most of the technology is still "not aware," and therefore "it’s not a true artificial intelligence yet, but that day will come." MacEachern said most of what's on the market in the area of fitness wearables is mainly for tracking motion, but he expects devices to become available that take "an in-depth look at your peddle stroke while you cycle; it tells you what’s wrong with it and either refers you to some online material that helps you train or even a coach.” He added: “Ultimately, all of this is heading into implantable devices, if you really want to go far into the future," adding that it's "already happening, for example, with insulin-delivery systems.” Lee Silverstone, co-founder of Ottawa-based Gymtrack, said during a presentation at Tuesday's event that the goal of the wearables industry should be to build more of an ecosystem. He said he would like to see new products coming out that are complimentary, rather than redundant to, what's already there. "You don’t want to build an mp3 player when you have an iPod," he said. "You want to build apps, you want to build an ecosystem, which you can operate in." — With reporting by Shruti Shekar at sshekar@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Wearables will increasingly use AI, say techies

News | June 24, 2015

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Wearables will increasingly use AI, say techies

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