Smart Objects
As well as some great apps on the market, there are great innovations being made in the 'internet of things' where the objects do the thinking for you. Sleep apps have been popular for a while, where you input your sleeping patterns against your mood to find your optimum time to hit the hay, but one company has taken this even further with smart pyjamas.
The SleepShirt, a product of Rest Devices, analyses your sleep patterns based on respiration patterns. The data gathered is then automatically uploaded to their servers for you to access online. Here you can get insights into the times of night at which you're most restless or awake to determine when you should sleep. Now you can access the data you're generating when you're not even awake to acknowledge it.
For big data to really work for personal use, we're going to rely more and more on objects that become a seamless part of our daily lives. Pebble is a Kickstarter project that's aiming to bring data analysis to you on the go. The Pebble watch started off by bringing you information such as when you got an SMS or a call, but it's been developed to function through apps. Now you can use your watch on the go, generating data all the time so that Pebble can constantly analyse for you.
This is an exciting advancement in big data as it shows the potential for objects to do the collation and analysing for you, without the need to manually enter data or even analyse it yourself. Of course, there will be objections to 'things' doing the thinking for us, but the potential for digital technology to play a part in improving daily life and improving efficiency is too powerful to ignore.
Image Sources
All images courtesy of The Noun Project.
- Smartphone by Christopher McDonnell
- Money by Hakan Yalcin
- Suit by Jon Trillana
- Laptop by Daxx Longaphie
- Piggy Bank by Marie_ยต__Poumeyrol
- Watch by Simon Child