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WEARING YOUR
INTELLIGENCE: HOW TO
APPLY ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE IN
WEARABLES AND IOT
eogez/Flickr
WEARABLES AND THE Internet of Things (IoT) may give the impression that it’s all
about the sensors, hardware, communication middleware, network and data but
the real value (and company valuation) is in insights. In this article, we explore
artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that are becoming indispensable
tools for insights, views on AI, and a practical playbook on how to make AI part of
your organization’s core, defensible strategy.
FIRST DEFINITIONS
Before we proceed, let’s first define the terms. Otherwise, we risk commingling
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11/10/2015 Wearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT | WIRED
marketing terms like “Big Data” and not addressing the actual fields.
FEAR OF AI
Though perhaps not explicitly stated, you will find that some at your work hold sci-
fi views of AI that could hamper proactive exploration of AI and machine learning
within your organization. AI, for some, bring images of HAL 9000 from
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11/10/2015 Wearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT | WIRED
Many futurists have speculated about the future of artificial intelligence that could
rival or exceed human intelligence. One of those futurists is Ray Kurzweil, a
recipient of the prestigious National Medal of Technology and Innovation honor.
Kurzweil claims that machines will pass the Turing AI test by 2029, and that
around 2045, “the pace of change will be so astonishingly quick that we won’t be
able to keep up, unless we enhance our own intelligence by merging with the
intelligent machines we are creating”. He further claims that humans will be a
hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence that becomes increasingly
dominated by its non-biological component. Kurzweil envisions nanobots inside
our bodies that fight against infections and cancer, replace organs, and improve
memory and cognitive abilities. Eventually our bodies will contain so much
augmentation that we will be able to alter our “physical manifestation at will”.
AGI raises difficult ethical questions and risks to civilization and humans. Political
scientist Charles T. Rubin believes that AI can be neither designed nor guaranteed
to be benevolent. He argues that “any sufficiently advanced benevolence may be
indistinguishable from malevolence.” Humans should not assume machines or
robots would treat us favorably, because there is no reason to believe that they
would be sympathetic to our system of morality, which has evolved along with our
particular biology. Hyper-intelligent AI may not necessarily decide to support the
continued existence of mankind, and would be extremely difficult to stop.
Stephen Hawking believes that AI has a lot of promising things to offer for future,
but not without possible dire consequences. He says that “success in creating AI
would be the biggest event in human history,” and “unfortunately, it might also be
the last”.
Even Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire, tweeted recently that “We need
to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes. Hope we’re
not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that
is increasingly probable.”
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF AI
AND MACHINE LEARNING
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11/10/2015 Wearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT | WIRED
So how can AI and machine learning be applied to wearables and the Internet of
Things? Let’s walk through a few examples.
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11/10/2015 Wearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT | WIRED
EMOTION MEASUREMENT:
BRANDEMOTIONS
BrandEmotions solves the problem of quantifying consumers’ emotions.
Sentiment analysis and surveys provide positive/ negative or stacked ranked
results but brands still can’t classify nor measure the emotions of their consumers.
BrandEmotions enables brands to measure how consumers feel about their brand
experience, from retail, live events, movies, hotels, cruises, amusement parks to
advertising. BrandEmotions, a product of Amyx+McKinsey, visualizes the
emotional reaction of participants to brand engagement, allowing brands to
optimize the brand experience, increase brand loyalty and accurately target
products and services at the right time. BrandEmotions’s emotion sensing,
machine learning platform measures physiological data captured through a broad
range of wearable devices and Internet of Things connected devices to translate
data into emotional classifications and intensity using its proprietary
EmotionIQ methodology.
MEDICATION COMPLIANCE:
VITALITY
Vitality, acquired by NANTHEALTH, addresses the billion dollar medication
adherence market with an Internet-connected pill cap called the GlowCap that
blinks and sounds when it’s time to take medication. Vitality’s compliance-
enhancing system tries to change patient behavior through a combination of
feedback, reminders, education, and incentives to improve patient’s medication
adherence. The GlowCap provides real-time data to caregivers, such as when
medication has been removed or a dose skipped. Patients can reorder by simply
pushing a button on the cap.
Speaking on a panel at the Wearables + Things 2014 conference, Dr. Yan Chow,
the former Medical Director of Kaiser Permanente’s IT Innovation group, stated
that drug compliance is a complex, multi-layered issue. “It’s not simply that
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11/10/2015 Wearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT | WIRED
patients forget to take their medication. Some patients disregard advice from
doctors and family members for irrational reasons,” asserts Dr. Chow. Blinking pill
bottles may not be enough. IoT startups need to understand at a deeper level how
to overcome stubborn resistance to drug compliance, whether that’s through
reminders, education, gamification, or something else.
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11/10/2015 Wearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT | WIRED
ROBOTICS: PETRONICS
Petronics recently launched and funded Mousr on Kickstarter, the first robotic
mouse that can see and react to a cat’s movements, bringing to life the Tom &
Jerry chase for your cats. Equipped with a 360 degree camera, motion sensing
technologies, and Bluetooth, Mousr responds to motion and external forces to
escape a cat’s paw. According to co-founder David Jun, next on their product
roadmap is “to develop AI algorithms that will help Mousr to outsmart a cat every
time”. Petronics introduces robotics into the home in an affordable, gamified way
that opens the door for other startups to pursue robotic AI dogs and eventually
child-sized AI robots with machine learning-based movements and natural
language process capabilities. This is validated by JIBO, the world’s first family
robot, pioneered by a social robotics MIT professor.
Other noteable AI-based home robotics include Anki Drive and WowWee. Anki
Drive combines virtual car racing games with physical RC cars powered by
artificial intelligence. WowWee’s MiP self-balancing robot with GestureSense
technology not only responds to hand gestures but is aware of its surroundings.
AI and machine learning techniques are being actively applied in many areas:
1. Get clarity on the business problem that you are trying to solve. As a senior
executive, you shouldn’t be trying to figure out which AI or machine learning
approach to apply but rather to determine what are the actionable insights that
will make your offering defensible in the marketplace. For Google it meant better
search results.
For a cliff note version, refer to AI co-founder John McCarthy’s article.
For more in-depth, search for specialized books that cover machine learning,
natural language processing, robotics, computer vision, neuroscience, probabilistic
reasoning/ programming, logic, bioinformatics, etc.
Depending on the subfield, some systems cannot reach a high degree of accuracy
without human assistance, such as in the case of recognizing images. In those
cases, a crowdsourcing approach like the Amazon Mechanical Turk, reCAPCHA,
and EyeWire helps refine the model further through human input.
relationship between the different schemas must be understood before the data in
all those tables can be integrated. Additionally, companies are shifting to using
both SQL and NoSQL, structured or unstructured relational database, formats for
data storage depending on the application.
5. Hire the right talent. To do it right, your organization has to commit to building
the right team. For instance, adding to Google’s already deep AI bench, Google
hired futurist Ray Kurzweil in 2012 as the Director of Engineering to oversee
Google’s most forward-leaning ideas.
In some cases, it might make more sense to hire a consultancy with the expertise
in AI rather than to build from ground up.
ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE
It’s easy to get caught up on the wearable and the Internet of Things sensors,
hardware and communication protocols but the key differentiator to your solution
will be the actionable intelligence that it derives from data.
Spend the time to seek the truth about AI and appropriate the fundamental
knowledge. Equipped with a powerful arsenal, you will then be ready to craft a
defensible business strategy. In turn, you have the potential to create a higher
valuation firm that will lead the competitive pack. Start applying the scale and
power of AI today.
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