How Advanced Sensors Will Change Our Lives

Imagine you woke up in the year 2030. Just like a living organism develops more and more senses to increase survival rates, humanity is developing more and more sensors to get a more accurate perception of the world we live in. In 2030, we will have trillions of connected sensors that give us very advanced and sensitive ‘senses’. Our sensors will allow us to make extensive use of autonomous vehicles (cars, drones, trucks, trains, etc.). They are packed full of sensors.

In 2030 our homes are full of sensors. Our clothes and communication devices are full of sensors. Our infrastructure is full of sensors. In fact, almost everything man-made is equipped and packed with smart sensors. Our modern autonomous vehicles all have sensors, and our communication devices and wearables sense everything in detail going on around each of us. So everything that’s happening outside on the street is part of the information going back into the system. All the smart devices we use in our homes sense everything that is happening inside our homes and public buildings. The type of sensors that we have in 2030 are so sophisticated they are able to register all kinds of information. These sensors are able to register much more information than we can now imagine. We will have sensors that can gather data even around the entire light spectrum, the entire sound spectrum, all kinds of radiation, very subtle vibrations, energy patterns in the human body, complex information patterns in our brains, material properties from a distance, electromagnetic forces and disturbances, gravity and G-force, and many more.

Image: Emulate Provides organ in a chip, to test the effectiveness of medication outside of your body.

The quality of the sensors that are around us every day in 2030 is remarkable. It’s the unique combination of sophisticated sensors with the AI in the cloud that processes the information the sensors gather that allow them to artificially see, hear, smell, and feel like humans – only better! What do I mean by better than us? Well, future sensors can smell many times better than our dogs, see a detail from a distance better than an eagle, and hear many times better than a bat. They can even register the earth’s magnetic field many times more accurately than birds do.

Image: Openwater is developing an FMRI like scanner/sensor, but more accurate and only the size of a small hat.

For example, the many cameras in your home and car are so sophisticated they can measure your heart rate and blood pressure from a distance. The smell sensors in your clothing and your bathroom gadgets are so sensitive they can smell any kind of disease from your breath in a very early stage. Sound sensors can recognize you by your unique breathing pattern from a distance and can analyze your voice and vocal tones and find, for example, health problems or nutrition deficiencies. They can even measure your voice stress levels and remind you to calm down!

Image: Beyond verbal uses the sound of your voice for multiple medical diagnoses

Spectrum analyzers in your communication device can see exactly what nutrition and ingredients are contained in the meal you’re about to eat. These sensors are so smart, so they don’t even send all the data through. They are bright enough to send just the filtered conclusions that are useful for the next layer that processes the information. Your home sensors are even equipped with small integrated neural network processors and local AI to process the information locally. This reduces the noise in the rest of the internet. Still, all these sensors generate unthinkable amounts of data, because there are so many! All this data and information from these sensors are monitored and processed by artificial intelligence. In this way, humanity has access to absolute knowledge of almost everything.

The Doctor In Your Pocket

In the future, you are going to have sensors that have the capacity to help you to stay healthy. These sensors will be able to measure everything from your location and speed of travel, right through to small and very subtle biological processes and information patterns going on inside your body. They are so sensitive that they can, for example, diagnose diseases from only the smell of your breath or your skin. Once again, Nature showed us the way here because it was discovered late in the twentieth century that dogs (who have a truly amazing sense of smell and a massive portion of their brain dedicated to processing smell) could sniff out certain cancers. Modern sensor technology was inspired by examples in Nature to look into our body using ultrasound frequencies and analyze our blood and DNA without sticking a needle into you!

Image: Healthcare technology has become more personal (butterflynetwork.com)

Bio-electric medication

Machine learning algorithms have identified many subtle information patterns and structures in our body and they have also identified many root causes of diseases and can come up with information patterns to heal our body on an information level. As a result, we now have information medicines (bio-electric medication) that work in the electromagnetic/light spectrum instead of the chemical spectrum like traditional medication did in the past. With this powerful new technology, we are able to reprogramme our cells to help us cure almost every chronic disorder or disease – a disease that is less prevalent anyway because we are managing our health better and are subject to fewer pollutants than we were thirty years ago. We have bio-electric medicines, which are electric information signals that instruct our cells in our body to relax, recover, and regain health, restoring the health of our entire body. These virtual medicines are shared freely over the internet; they are like free, open-source software programs, and many of them aren’t patented and free for everyone to use without cost or license. Everybody in the world with a smart communication device and an internet connection can download or stream these information medicines from the web and use them to regain health. These informational medicines can be given to our body using our smart communication device and in some cases with the use of an extra accessory. Now that’s what I call a useful app!

Image: AI + Hivemind technology optimizes chest radiograph diagnosis

Our smart communication device (I’ll call it a smartphone for simplicity’s sake, but in reality, it’s way more than that!) acts like a real-time biofeedback device that can measure our health and in most cases heal/correct it directly without needing a visit to a doctor or medical specialist. Based on the measurements, our 'smartphone' asks you some additional questions, as an old-fashioned doctor would. All the input is gathered and compared in real-time with hundreds of millions of other similar cases. The artificial intelligence behind it comes with a diagnosis and possible treatment within seconds. We are living in an age where almost all chronic health problems can be prevented and restored by the use of smart devices and smart e-health technology. In the world of 2030, our primary communication devices are also the devices we use for treatment on a personal level. Also, our homes are full of wellness technology that monitor and correct our living environment in real-time. This wellness technology controls and regulates air humidity, air pollution, noise/sound pollutions, EMF radiation, and many more environmental pollutants that may be harmful to our well-being. These same wellness devices are also present in all of our transportation vehicles and public buildings. Everything is assured to create the most healthy and comfortable environment for people, animals, and plants.

The Future of Our Healthcare

In 2030 we have entered a time of unprecedented health. The expensive and inefficient healthcare infrastructure that was mainly focused on treating symptoms was wiped out a couple of years ago now. The traditional big pharmaceutical companies and medical mindset were often focused on earning money and avoiding liabilities, but not on healing people in the long term. The management of these companies knew they could earn more money from sick people, even though the doctors and medical staff themselves were doing their best.

Thankfully, as a global community, we have seen the light. Although there are still some elements left of our traditional healthcare system, it’s mainly focused on fixing acute and life-threatening health problems that are, for example, caused by accidents or aging.

Image: 3D medicine printer by Medical doctor Martin Burke at the University of Illinois

Our old system was pretty good at this stuff, and since the massive changes and our ability to manage our food and therefore our own health, and the ability to 3D-print drugs, we have been able to put the talent of our doctors and nurses to better use. Advanced technology like sensors and artificial intelligence are now able to diagnose the root cause of our symptoms and cure our body faster than ever. We are now only interested in the root cause of health problems and we now have technology that helps us to find that root cause. Smart sensors and artificial intelligence provide humanity with the tools to monitor and predict our individual health and our level of well-being. Cheap but advanced sensors in our clothes, jewelry, wearables, sports accessories, homes, and cars measure everything and report back to our AI, doctor, or health community professional if we need to get checked out!

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About the author

Christian Kromme was an innovative tech-entrepreneur for 15 years until he discovered the DNA code behind disruptive innovation and how to use this to predict the next big wave of technological disruption. Now Christian is one of the most in-demand global futurist keynote speakers, speaking in front of tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, business leaders, and policymakers about the radical impact of disruptive technologies on humans and organizations. Over the years Christian Kromme has inspired many companies with his keynotes and his bestseller book Humanification.