What My Hearing Aid Taught Me About the Future of Wearables (opens in new tab)

One could argue that eventually the market will settle on peripherals interconnected by something that could be open. I don't need a "smart hearing aid" with cloud connectivity... I need a quality hearing aid whose sole job is to take a secured audio stream and play it with as much quality as it can muster. I can carry the processing unit in my pocket and drive it with anything I want. I don't need "smart glasses" with integrated cloud this and proprietary that... I need glasses that take a secured stream of video data and display them with all their might. I don't need an integrated... etc etc. There's no reason the machine in my pocket driving them can't be open.

This is, of course, not what will happen at first. It will take time for the "race to the bottom" to produce this result.

I'll say this though. I don't consider myself terribly ideological on this point, but in practice I probably am. I am not turning over my hearing and my vision to a company, or indeed any organization. If it's not open, I'll play the luddite. It's not worth it.

They want to lock you inside their ecosystems because that's how they can make more money off you. Simple as that.

If your mission is really to improve the world, giving your users access to raw data and freedom in controlling the device is no-brainer. But that rarely happens, because improving human condition is just a marketing ploy. So instead you get cloud nonsense that isn't really designed to serve you.

Most consumer hardware companies (and that includes especially printer vendors) could do the world a big favour by having courage to admit that whatever companion software they'll write will likely be crap, and leave that to the community.

>> "Why shouldn't we demand the same for wearables?"

This is a nice idea but it seems to me that in order for this to work well the hardware and software need to be integrated tightly. Even Google Wear seems to be heading in that direction. I could see Ubuntu trying this but they still seem to be trying to get the phone right so it'll be 2020 before we see anything good with wearables. Maybe Google's modular phone project could lead to open/adaptable hardware for wearables and that opens the door for open/free software too.

The typical wearable/IoT architecture has vendor-provided cloud storage, and some cloud-based processing as key elements. As with person-to-person communication, current encryption technology is hard to use in this context. Even though there's no second person involved, the cloud-based processing of your personal encrypted data makes securing it inconvenient. Vendors don't seem to be serious about making sensor data secure for individuals.

>> "For a wearable to 'really' succeed it must be 1. Unobtrusive. 2. Elegantly hidden."

I disagree with point 2. If you make the wearable into something that it already worn (e.g. watch) and make it just as fashionable you can succeed. The problem is that technology is an industry with almost no fashion sense. The closest product I've seen to succeeding design wise has been the Apple Watch and even it looks a bit clunky (hopefully this will change as the technology improves).

I would also point out that the iOS software for my iPhone is really, really basic and unsophisticated. I'd love to figure out how to hack it myself and write my own software. I guess I should learn Obj-C first... ;)