Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman spoke yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and laid out two big ideas that we’ve been talking about a lot around here: wearables and identity, and wearables as the generator of huge data sets.
Rahman talked about using wearable devices as a means to interact with other connected devices and use them to customize your environment. Think about the way a luxury auto works: the car can adjust things like the seat position and suspension depending on whose key fob it senses in the driver’s seat. In the same way, your house could understand who’s home (and in which room) and adjust the thermostats accordingly. Or your ATM could put a floor limit on withdrawals depending if it’s you or your kid making a withdrawal.
The other idea stems from the massive amounts of data that activity tracker companies compile on you. Rahman said Jawbone has the largest data set of sleep pattern in the world. If you accept that the data measurement is good (and we have our doubts, although errors in massive data sets have a way of self-correcting), there may be some important science that could be done with that information. Question: does Jawbone have the right to use it? With so many users contributing to the data, is it personal information anymore? Can — or should — users opt out, and if they do, should they be able to benefit from the results of the science?
From TechCrunch’s report:
“Tomorrow is all about more information, more signals, more understanding of yourself, but then taking all of that and really crunching it,” [Rahman] said. “Taking all that data, contextualizing it for the use and turning it that into understanding which leads to data [is the goal].”