The 2020 Summer Olympics will be in Tokyo, and people are already talking about how wearable technology might play into a Games located in one of the world’s most tech-forward cities in six years. There was a very provocative discussion about that recently at a wearables conference in Tokyo. The upshot: don’t focus on the devices, focus on the data the devices throw off.
Imagine an Olympics, suggested journalist Toshinao Sasaki, where data feeds from athletes were freely available to competitors, the media and the public. Imagine, too, that the data was sponsored, in the same way that timing at Olympic Games is sponsored by Omega (a member of the Swatch Group, by the way). IBM, for instance, has sponsored scoring data streams at US Open tennis tournaments; this might an interesting opportunity for them.
2020 is 6 years away. In some ways, that’s a long time. In others, it’s practically tomorrow.