On the future of wearable technology

With the start of 2014, we are in the era of predictions on "the future of X".  I came across report and presentation on the future of wearable technology both by PSFK labs and Intel. 

It partitions the wearable technologies to three types:

Connected intimacy: person-to-person -  tracking devices by persons on other persons, monitoring babies, hug simulation jacket (where a parent can simulate hug to a child from remote) and more..

Tailored ecosystem: person-to-computer - such as bracelet that send hot or cold thermoelectric pulses 

co-evolved possibilities:  person-as-computer:  heartbeat signature as password, operating gadgets by blinking using smart make-up, and computers embedded inside persons.

It will take several years to make them main stream, but wearable technologies are the sensors and actuators of the future. 

58 sensor applications

I came across a site that lists "top 50 sensor applications for the smarter world".  It actually list 58 applications partitioned to the following areas::  smart cities, smart environment, smart water, smart metering, security & emergencies, retail, logistics, industrial control, smart agriculture, smart animal farming, domestic & home automation, and eHealth.  

I worth digging into the different areas to check the potential applications, and the role of event processing in each of them. 

Sensors as actuators

Phil Windley, the CTO of Kyntex, has reported recently in his Blog about "talking back to a thermostat".  Phil has constructed a thermostat as event producer,  The example he talks about is changing the display color, however one can think on even more meaningful actions like turning on and off the air-condition.  The thinking of sensors as vehicles for human awareness is not enough,  in our universe, there will be more sensors than people, and especially much more sensors than people who are able to look at sensor reading treat is as data (small or big) and make sense of this data.  We are more and more move to era of autonomic computing, the Mars rover "curiosity" is largely autonomic, since the speed of light barrier creates a time delay that makes it virtually impossible for remote control.   We'll see more and more sensors who will also serve as actuators, or smart sensors directly talking with smart actuators (e.g. thermostat to the air-condition

controller).    The required event processing  (filter, aggregation,  maybe even patterns that takes into consideration other sensors' input, like presence of people in the house)  can be distributed between the smart sensor and the smart actuators without any middleware.    More on embedded event processing - later.