Most people seem to have interest in product comparisons even when the products have different intended audiences. These comparison usually are quite slanted in one direction due to the predilections of the author and provide little to no value because it is an opinion piece and not a true evaluation. So the discussion either resonates with you or feels completely ridiculous. With devices, authors seem to enjoy rating similar products through the same lenses even if does not make sense.  Why would a purely home consumer ever want a business centric device? The sway is trying to make other people see the world through your lenses instead of educating people to make their own choices that are right for them. This is completely true for phones, and it’s also true for wearables.

I have been using a Microsoft Band for several months, and my son just received his Apple Watch. My world is app UX design and architecture for large enterprise systems, which mixes in complex mobile and large screen immersive data visualization experiences. My son’s world is that he is attending Art Center College of Design for Interaction Design and is about to embark on a summer internship at Facebook. We both own Apple and Microsoft products. His center of gravity is in elegance and beauty of design, where mine is in elegance and performance of design. But what is also different is what do in life which changes what we need from our devices.

For wearables, my world is fitness. I want to know steps, how well I’m sleeping, and, most importantly, detailed tracking of my mountain biking adventures with gps, heart rate, and calorie burn. On a second tier of importance are the notifications through email, calendar, Skype, SMS, Twitter, and Facebook. With my activities (mountain biking) I’m often in dirt and rocks and slamming into things on the mountain, so I can’t worry about the health of my wearable. At the end of every ride I shoot off an email to my buddies that has these attachments:

This is my lense. For $200, I feel I am getting my money’s worth out of my Microsoft Band. I don’t care that it is ugly and is not distinguishable from other wearables. It’s a touch bulky but I’ve gotten used to it. I wish the battery life were a little better. Putting that into context, I can do a long 20 mile mountain bike ride only if I’m near a full charge. It is hitting pretty much every sensor on the device with GPS sucking up most of the juice. I wish there was a little better control of how notifications are managed. For example, I may just want my work email pushed to my Band and not my personal email and not have to define a discrete list of people. No device is perfect and we will all need to judge whether or not the compromise you would need to make justifies its continued use.

My son would never use a fitness band, and would never use a Microsoft Band. He decided on an Apple Watch long ago. The only reason he has an Apple Watch so soon is that he prioritized a quarter of his net worth (i.e. $800) to this device. He has never worn a watch before. I would never wear a device so expensive on a mountain biking ride. I hear my son extol the sapphire glass on the watch, but he also used to talk about the shatterproof gorilla glass on his Android phone before it lost a battle against cement. The leather band is from a European country and costs $150 alone, and it’s handmade and smells of new leather. It is the stainless steel version, and the buckle on the leather band is milled from same metal as the housing. When my son was telling me all this, my wife laughed at the look of complete and utter disinterest on my face. Clearly, vanity is important to him and a core reason why he purchased the device.

So after about 24 hours living with the Apple Watch, I asked my son of his first impressions:

To hammer home my point about my son and fitness, his daily caloric goal was set to 300. The screen real estate feels small after using iPhones. The force touch is a new and interesting interaction being shared to other types of Mac devices, meaning a tap versus a pressed touch will behave differently. My impression is that although the interaction is interesting, it may not be discoverable for the less sophisticated users and if apps sporadically adopt it. The digital crown has been designed very well as animations that react to its movement feel natural and unforced. After apps are loaded, reactions to touch and the crown are smooth making the device not feel underpowered.

App navigation is not quite worked out because tapping the wrong app is too easy – you need to be precise and not move around while doing it. Siri integration seems snappy. My son asked Siri “how far is the moon” and she responded promptly. I had to ask Cortana on my Band the same question and the response was obtained in about the same time. Voice quality seems to have been nailed. It’s very Dick Tracy, but I had to explain to my son what that means. I could hear my son’s voice quite clearly, and he could hear my voice just fine through it. It was tested in quiet room in ideal conditions.

What Apple is doing with tactile feedback is interesting. Vibration patterns can be used for different things. For example, my son has CarPlay. When using navigation his Apple Watch starting vibrating with one pattern when he had to turn left, and another vibration pattern when he had to turn right.  My son enjoys the one less step he needs to do to buy things via Apple Pay on the Apple Watch. Not sure I like that it is even easier to spend money. Basically you just need to move the watch to the NFC reader and boom – you have been charged. The idea here is that since the device is strapped to your arm, it remains authenticated after supplying the passcode once per day. If the Apple Watch is taken off, it would need to be authenticated again before it could be used. Another interesting feature is a use of a meta language to communicate to your friends. Of course they will also need an Apple Watch. Through this digital touch, you can send vibration patterns to a friend. This could even be your heart beat. Also, you could send simple sketches to each other. He doesn’t know anyone yet with an Apple Watch so it remains to be seen how well used this feature will be.

So these are the lenses of my son. He loves new gadgets and loves the Apple ecosystem. Vanity is important to him. At $400, the device feels worth it to my son. But at $800, he says it doesn’t. The vanity effect seems to balance out the feeling that it is not worth it. It will be interesting to ask him the same questions he has worn the device for a couple of months. Perhaps he can sell it this week for 4x what he paid for it. Anyone?

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My son is attending Art Center College of Design for Interaction Design, and was recently accepted for a summer internship at Facebook. I had a front row seat to the whole process. As someone directly involved in recruiting top talent for InterKnowlogy, watching how Facebook recruits was fascinating. What Facebook has embraced from head to stern is that they are only as good as their people. Many companies give this lip service, and they might actually believe it, but their actions don’t hold up. Facebook is continuously bringing in the best young minds into the fold through internships and putting their stripes on them as quickly as possible. Having name cache does not hurt – what college student wouldn’t want to work at Facebook? But that only helps to generate a long list of potential candidates. It’s the rest of what my son underwent that was most impressive.

At Facebook, potential interns are interviewed by qualified people. These are senior employees that are skilled in the domain of the intern, and not someone who has been delegated a task to interview a “lowly intern”. Qualified people can quickly evaluate and bond with potential interns, and it only serves to excite the students. At every step, Facebook was demonstrating how invested they are in the success of the interns. They have the foresight to prioritize the time of the right employees to engage with the potential interns. By doing this, Facebook can maximize their chances of having a highly qualified crop of new talent. My son felt that they took the time to get to know him and his interests, including the type of work he wants to do to best align his internship into one of the many Facebook teams. They never made him believe that they were doing him a favor by just talking to him – they made him feel special and valued.

After successfully completing this process, my son was given an internship offer beyond his expectations. Facebook is showering him with hardware and software (all the tools he needs to design apps). Their handling all aspects of the internship including how he will be travelling to Menlo Park, managing his lodging for three months, and even will be feeding him. Facebook, at every turn, is a sending a message that they value him and his time, and want him to value his experience. This investment has already produced a sense of loyalty in my son. By spending the money and taking the time and putting forth the energy to engage the right people, Facebook is setting themselves up to be able to hire top talent right from the best colleges year after year, generation after generation.

Want to make sure the best and brightest are continuously flowing into your company? See the above.

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My mother passed away from cancer in 2011. During her final days, she was comatose and needed to be moved frequently. The movement was not enough to prevent bed sores, otherwise known as pressure ulcers. Pressure ulcers are caused by pressure that limits blood flow to skin and surrounding tissues. This experience is burned into my memory, and as a designer and technologist I wanted to explore ways to prevent others from suffering as my mother did. I was shocked to find that, in the United States alone, more than $10 billion is spent annually on the treatment of pressure ulcers. Could technology be used to help? Yes it can.

I led an internal R&D effort to explore the use of Microsoft Kinect camera technology to monitor the amount of motion over a period of time. The goal was to identify and measure how much motion was happening, and then report when a lack of motion occurred. We call the amount of motion detected Motion Energy, or ME for short. If a lack of ME is detected over a period of time, a nurse would be automatically notified with an ME event. As the exploration continued, I found studies related to patients falling out of their beds and hurting themselves. I began to wonder if a lack of motion could be monitored, could too much motion also be monitored? The answer is also yes.

The studies related to patient falls are reporting that more than $20 billion is spent annually on the treatment related to injuries suffered from the fall. The same ME technology used for monitoring a lack of motion can detect when a motion spike is occurring. A nurse can be immediately notified about the event and an attempt can be made to prevent the patient from falling or further injuring themselves after a fall by providing immediate assistance.

This video shows an example of the core ME technology:

We envision a system that can be placed into a patient’s room that would passively monitor them. When too little or too much motion is detected, a ME event would be generated by the system. This ME event would be sent to a Cloud backed system to log the event. The on call nurse would be notified on a mobile device immediately of the ME event, and an action can be taken. From the mobile device, a video feed from the patient’s room could be viewed when the ME event occurred (e.g. for a patient’s fall). The video event can also be stored in the cloud with the ME event.

We believe a system like this could not only prevent suffering but improve patient satisfaction. Dollars saved from prevention would more than offset the cost of the system within the first year of use. If you would like more information about Motion Energy, or discuss other potential uses for Motion Energy, please contact us at curious@interknowlogy.com.

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