The Internet Of Insertion

This Goes Inside A Cow; Ouch

On my Twitter feed (you aren't signed up for my Twitter feed? It's @davidlmountain, please, feel free) over the holiday, I noted how one of the things to be thankful for is that, in this lifetime, you aren't a dairy cow. (Yes, I'm presuming and yes, marketing and advertising is on the way. Patience.)

Another thing to be thankful for: that you aren't a dairy cow 130 miles northwest of London, where, if Bloomberg.com is to be believed,cows get Internet of Things transmitters placed inside the first of their four stomachs, so that they can be remote monitored for illness, going into heat, and so forth.

The weighted sensor is said to be about the size of a hot dog, and will last about four years, which is about as long as a dairy cow is productive. Given the expense of such animals, and the amount of product that a farmer can expect to receive from a healthy animal, as opposed to an ill one, it's a clear win for the farmers, and the animals don't have a say in the matter. But it also lends itself to a clear if this, then what thought exercise.

My dog, and maybe yours as well, has a microchip in his leg. It's about the size of a grain of rice, and he got it when he was a puppy. It causes him no pain, and he's in no way aware of it. It's there on the off chance that he ever gets lost and found by a professional with the right technology. My children, and maybe yours as well, have phones that can easily give the location in the event of crisis. My car, and maybe yours as well, has a transmitter on the windshield to allow for toll collection at speed, and the newer model that my wife drives has much more than that. All of that can be used to track our movements. Oh, and the vast majority of our purchases comes through digital technology, which is to say, easily trackable movements. My credit card, and maybe yours as well, rewards me to use it, and carrying a great deal of cash isn't just unseemly, it's dangerous.

Much of this is so commonplace now as to be barely worth mentioning, and yet they all add up to an ever-thickening web of connectivity, which only seems noteworthy when it's, well, new. Or invasive.

Now, we'll add another moment of technology, which is the introduction of a supercapacitor that can be charged by human body heat. This may seem like a development that doesn't have immediate consumer utility, but that would be wrong. Just imagine, for instance, a mobile phone that you just need to hold to recharge. Useful, right? So much so that it may be ubiquitous within a decade.

Where does all of this go next? Well, for my money, we're going to see real movement in wearable health monitoring technology, especially once the battery charge is more or less an afterthought from body heat. It's one thing to know how many steps you've taken, or your standing heart rate. It's quite another to know when someone with a chronic condition is at risk for any number of factors, or for someone who is post-surgery to be able to recuperate, safely, at home. No one wants to lose a loved one for any reason, let alone something that technology could easily prevent. Becoming a bio-mechanical hybrid also seems, well, off-putting. But probably less than being at risk. (Also, it leads to revolutionary possibilities in targeting, ad effectiveness, and so on. See, this all comes back to how we pay the bills.)

The question comes to this: where will the push/pull of utility versus discomfort, privacy versus health, security versus expense, fall?

Because, well, I love my dog. That's why I had him chipped.

And I don't love my kids any less...

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