While everyone was clamoring for cut-and-paste features and multimedia messaging (MMS) in the most recent update of the iPhone OS back in March, what was most important in the big picture was the demonstration of the already iconic consumer device as an interface to health and medical technology. Now, the device is not just for calls, games pictures and music, but a potentially important tool in capturing, analyzing and communicating critical data about your health.

Since this announcement, more medical technology companies have been working to build "an app for that". Already a flood of iPhone applications are coming to market in an attempt to leverage the capabilities of the device as support for diagnosis and care. Smartphones, already in many medical professionals' pockets as a communication device, are becoming more attractive as actual professional tools for health and medicine.

Image Source: IntelIt's a long way from complex, expensive medical device to a $99 smartphone, however. And while the iPhone and its cousins may become portable interfaces and nodes to medical data, they aren't medical devices by themselves. Device makers are well aware of the higher standard of quality, reliability and efficacy placed on medical devices as a class—they have different regulatory standards to meet. But these consumer devices are penetrating the medical world, and will continue to do so at a faster pace.

What this change will do is bring a different view of design, usability and even a different class of applications and technologies into the medical world. Proprietary ports switch to USB. Touchscreens appear on more medical devices. Internet connectivity becomes standard. Is that device Windows or Linux-based? Consumer devices may influence medical ones far more than the other way around. And for a coming generation of doctors and nurses who have grown up with mobile phones, laptops, Playstations and Kindles around them, the expectations of user experience will change significantly.

What this points to is a missing like between these two categories, one which we believe is beginning to be connected from both ends. New devices moving from the hospital to home are taking on the look, feel and function of consumer electronics already (the Intel Health Guide, pictured here, is a good early example). New players will emerge in this space, and the focus on experience design will heighten. This is already happening, and now we expect it to accelerate. The impact may be felt most strongly in both the non-hospital transitional care and home medical environments, where these two categories of medical and consumer technology come together.

We plan to follow this evolution and look more deeply at the convergence of these two areas. Check back for more information about our research in this area, or contact us to find out more about our upcoming research agenda.

Thanks to a kind invite from Katrin at MobileActive.org, I traveled to London last week to reprise the rapid ideation game recently run at Mobile Tech 4 Social Change in Washington, DC to the assembled group at Vodafone's London facilities for the UK edition of the barcamp — and it was well worth the journey. The 60-odd group gave up a sunny, warm Saturday outside to bring their ideas, passion and experiences together to explore the application of mobiles in service to social need.

I ran a similar card-based exercise as had been done by two sets of teams in Washington, and the outcomes were equally creative, detailed and all-around brilliant (We are inching toward a business plan for one of these at some point!). Memorable solutions created by the teams that took the 45-minute challenge included:

• Agrario.mobi — A mobile radio broadcasting system designed to help rural-to-urban immigrants stay connected, get critical information, and act as a funding service to help these immigrants travel home.
• Text 10 for Water — This solution was designed to enable mobile users to donate their unused minutes to water projects, find out the status of projects they've donated to, and find out who has contributed to which projects. Terence Eden has posted more detail about this concept and is looking for feedback.
• Adopt an Election — This solution used a combination of the low-end mobile devices available in the fictional scenario and social networks to allow a large audience to "adopt" and monitor elections by tracking SMS messages about an election's status broadcast to Facebook and Twitter.

Conversations throughout the day were stimulating, and the proposed sessions ran the gamut from citizen journalism to privacy and surveillance in conflict zones to heatmapping. One common element was the focus on solutions, not simply identifying problems or looking at tech for tech's sake.

If you are at all interested in these topics and need a fresh infusion of ideas and inspiration, I recommend attending one of the upcoming events or looking to organize one of your own. Check out the new M4SC wiki for more info. More images from the event are here.

This week I had a rare opportunity to get to an event that is a departure from my usual circuit of professional conferences and client confabs—Mobile Tech 4 Social Change in Washington, DC. Put on by Katrin Verclas at MobileActive.org and held at Google's offices in the nation's capital, "M4Change" followed the barcamp traditions of being created not just for but by the participants, which adds so much more value to the content of the day. While I initially had planned to lurk and learn from others, I decided just before the event to step up and run a session.

With a little advance prep, I ran what was supposed to be one but became two rounds of mobile social brainstorming and rapid solution creation (thanks for the encore, players). This was done using a tool that proves quite handy in these situations—a deck of trend cards which, in conjunction with a set of constraints and a mission—allows teams of diverse players to get together and create, in this case, a mobile-related solution that serves a social need somewhere in the world.

The teams that played our game were immediately and deeply engaged in exchanging ideas, understandings, points of view, concepts, and some damn clever solutions to the barriers and discontinuities they faced in their dealt hands. Given just 30 minutes to assemble, read, discuss and create, the groups at M4Change—representing a mixture including technologists, activists, creatives, academics and policy folks—pulled together some fascinating approaches, particularly faced with some stingy barriers (sorry, guys).

As I tweeted briefly about Wednesday night after the event, some in particular stood out. While they were all excellent ideas, some items that stuck in my head were (I won't do them justice, but here goes):

• One team was a global foundation that sought to spread religious tolerance virally by using contactless communication between players of a global multiplayer game as a way of secretly identifying with each other in public as members of the same belief. In this team's overall game concept, players could earn currency by finding commonalities with people of different backgrounds and building the group based on diversity.
• A team representing a small advocacy utilized sensing networks to allow Sudanese villagers to find out how much water was in area wells by having well monitors text their water levels to locals. The idea was to save villagers having to walk miles to an empty well, and the aggregate data would provide a live map of water levels across the region, alerting aid groups where water supplies may be needed.
• An urban project serving a US city created a system to educate low-income women by distance learning using their local library for Internet access, then text quizzes and other reinforcements to the women's basic mobile phones as a means of reinforcing the learning afterwards. Friends could text questions and knowledge to each other as well, with more participation rewarded. The barrier this team had to work with was a lack of Web access on the women's mobiles. The solution therefore used shared Web access to deliver lessons and SMS to reinforce the learning and provide collaboration.
• A team representing a commercial mobile app developer designed a government-funded solution for Chinese eco-activists to record and send environmental violations and corruption to the government as a way of crowdsourcing law enforcement. In a twist, the team added a hidden ability to anonymize the app' s useand even scrub transmitted data, allowing the app to be coopted by other activists groups to communicate and report other types of violations.

All in all, these and other presented concepts were a terrific return for just 30 minutes of ideation among teams that had never met, with sometimes unfamiliar trends and concepts and some wicked problems to solve—thanks to all who took time out to play and create. Add to this some fantastic sessions on SMS data collection, using mobiles for political participation, open development tools and more, and the day was a huge opportunity to learn from bright minds at the forefront of using mobiles to affect social change. For more information on upcoming Mobile Tech for Social Change events, check MobileActive.org.

Some astute tech news readers may have noticed what seemed like a fairly ludicrous claim of potential growth the other day by Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg. In his keynote to the CTIA conference, Seidenberg talked about the possibility of reaching 500% penetration of wireless devices in the near future in the US. While it is possible for wireless to break 100% penetration in a given market—the UAE reported higher than 170% penetration last year, meaning the average person had 1.7 mobile subscriptions—500% seems a bit extreme. Multiple handset ownership isn't uncommon now in wealthier markets, but five per person is a little over the top.

What Seidenberg was actually referring to was the potential for embedded wireless technology in places other than the mobile phone—in laptops, appliances, set-top boxes, gaming devices, vehicles, and just about anything else that might either need a data connection or might otherwise have something to "say" to its owners, service suppliers or other objects.

Verizon already has 36 devices certified under its Open Development Initiative, including health devices, and other objects that may be monitoring something and need to report. Verizon isn't alone in this strategy: T-Mobile just announced a new embedded SIM for similar purposes, much smaller than a phone SIM card, able to be tucked away in a dizzying array of objects, machines and devices.

This idea isn't exactly new. The concept of M2M, or machine to machine, communication has been around for years, and mainly addressed industrial applications, in areas such as security, logistics, systems management, etc. What makes this idea interesting now is its movement into the retail consumer arena, and the push mobile operators are giving embedded wireless as a future growth opportunity.

The Kindle e-book reader, for example, quietly synchs itself using Sprint's US EVDO wireless network. As a result, in effect books have coverage areas. Take your Kindle outside the US at the moment, and it can't communicate to Whispernet, its carrier network, to synch between devices or download new content. While we are still in very early days, we are gradually sliding into the E2E, or everything-to-everything, era. We are already seeing this with app-rich devices such as the iPhone. As we become more reliant on these apps for information and utility, we also become reliant on their ability to talk to the necessary servers, other devices, or objects.

Beyond the obvious devices we already have in our pockets or on desktops or shelves, what mundane, everyday objects will be transformed not by the ability but the need to communicate to function? A lot of discussion has gone on recently about cloud computing's benefits and possible risks, but we haven't really extended that discussion (at the same level) to the possibilities embedded wireless opens up to the everyday world around us and the changes it will bring to our expectations and behaviors. Much of the debate is taking place at the philosophical and design levels, but not yet as extensively at the level of common consumer objects and how their roles in our daily lives may be transformed. Forget arguments about whether an e-reader can "read" to you aloud and who owns the royalties for that act and think about what everyday items your mobile operator will enable.

The cross-branding potential and the impact of bleeding technology values into previously non-technology processes will both be interesting to unpack. Will I bundle my microwave or running shoes with voice and Web on my AT&T bill? What's the quality of service expectation for my dictionary or Financial Times subscription? Sooner or later, we will start to ask these questions.

I had the fun opportunity to open the IDSA's NED event in Boston on Saturday and hopefully plant a few mindbombs among the 450-odd students and design practitioners in the audience (thanks again to Jordan and the NED crew for the invite!). It's an especially appropriate time to be talking about the intersection of foresight and design. It's been central to Changeist, as you can see from the front page of the site, for some time, and it's becoming central to discussion of foresight thinking now.

The Association of Professional Futurists' recent annual meeting was located at Arts Center in Pasadena for this very purpose—to bring the two communities together and talk about how methods from both disciplines can cross-pollinate, leading futurists to think more creatively, and hopefully helping designers build foresight into their ideation processes.

The second was the topic of my talk on the day, with the goal to hopefully begin to expand the horizons and thinking of the young designers in the room so they can start their working lives understanding the related nature of foresight and the critical role it can play in their approach to design—moving from passive to active foresight. Some words from the glowering Messrs Gibson and Sterling—the former's observation about the uneven distribution of the future in the now, and the latter's description of how designers mine the future to make the present, helped the listeners to see their role in context to noticing and drawing on indicators of change, and think about how they could build them into their work. 

Stuart Candy's post a few days ago on "Killer Imps" talked about the linkage between futures-led design and design-led futures. This was a useful construct to help help the group see further the common space between the two: they share forms of exploration, observation, critical thinking, advocacy and the ability to potentially accelerate preferred outcomes. At a time when we are witnessing important shifts—from serving abundance to dealing with constraint, from enjoying objects to requiring tools, from the desire for experiences to the need for solutions—integrating foresight into design more tightly is a must, not a maybe.

The theme of the event was "Revolution," and no revolution is complete without an uprising of the people. My concluding message was the need to take the insurgent's approach to this integration: not to try and force it overnight, but to carefully, steadily build towards it. By making important connections with likeminded professionals (creating a common front), gathering and sharing intelligence (probing and scouting), and looking for weak-points and opportunities to make important breakthroughs in thinking (picking your battles), we can ultimately win the day.