We’ve looked at the possible future of both health & fitness many times over the years – Workout Clothing, Virtual Training Partners, various medical discoveries and of course the Gymchats. Particularly #224.
It’s time once again to peek into the near-term future. Here are just a few of the health & fitness-related things I think we’re likely to see over the next year or so.
- The ability to measure air pollution increases rapidly, as do the calls for various forms of action. Global, real-time monitoring will likely appear in a number of forms.
- 3D-Printed clothing begins to appear in limited forms (parts of products, such as shoes). Not in widespread use – yet.
- Fitness wearable devices continue to grow in functionality (particularly their ability to predict events and to make suggestions), with some even becoming partially flexible.
- 3D printing begins to see fairly widespread use in dentistry – to fabricate crowns, bridges, dental models, clear aligners and of course synthetic replacement teeth.
- Several clinical trials for stem-cell therapies take place, and a number of conditions (such as ALS) move from ‘virtually untreatable‘ to ‘within reach of a potential treatment‘.
- As the cost of genomic sequencing continues to fall, some hospitals begin sequencing the genomes of every single patient.
- Passive prosthetic devices (things like regenerative knee and elbow braces) begin to appear.
General Trends
- A move towards ‘keeping people in reasonable health‘, rather than ‘fixing them when broken‘.
- A gradual merger of the online and in-person training approaches in many gyms. Both have very clear benefits.
- As fitness wearable devices become ever more powerful, the software will become increasingly important. For security, for the ability to predict events and for the ability to make person-specific recommendations.
Over to you. Do you agree or disagree with the various things listed; the items themselves or the timeframe? And is there anything you’d add to the list – anything you think we’ll probably see in 2016? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Of course, there’s a whole lot more – on these, and other aspects of health & fitness. Head over to the ‘Futurism‘ category and jump in the conversation.
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