Fashion Week San Diego: a lecture about Fashion/Clothing and incorporating Technology
Panel of speakers for fashion and technology questions. Left to right: rep for 314 smart purse, Qualcomm rep, TEDx San Diego curator, a SD fashion blogger, another more famous SD fashion blogger, a fashion expert, a fashion designer
The woman answering the question runs San Diego Fashion Week. She wants there to be a "Wearables Fashion Show" (technology aided fashion) someday soon.
This fashion blogger feels there are very few Wearables at the moment that she could recommend on her blog and that there is a lot of room for growth in the fashion design aspect of wearable technology.
This speaker wants Wearables to monitor and store our health information so that any doctor can access it and know all our history and habits.
Scary?
That was my initial reaction too. At the end we had open questions and my question was about where all this data is going to go and who would have access to it. Jack, the Qualcomm guy, spoke up right away and answered for all. He didn't exactly answer my question, but he did point out that all medical data is already protected by law. However, as for the rest... Well, he didn't make comment on that.
This speaker believes that Wearables will be the next great thing in life and that it will be a part of life in the future. She lives in San Francisco and says she lives in "a bubble" there because everybody talks about Wearables and knows that it's the future and that it's here to stay.
What was interesting about her is that she went to Harvard and MIT and she is from NYC but she said she moved to SF because that is where all the innovation is happening. This, to me, says a lot about not only where it's all happening, but backs up this idea that Wearables will be the future, even if right now they are in their infancy and are clunky. This is the ground floor guys. And they are looking for artists and designers to make their Wearables more attractive.
This speaker, whom is the The TEDx SD curator, says when they can work out the form and function of Wearables then it will become ubiquitous.
Allison of Fashion Week SD wants a wearable that monitors our health everyday and she wants it to tell us when we need to get some more vitamin D or drink more water. This is entirely possible and the altruistic wish behind big personal data collection. But I do wonder if all that data would automatically be protected as "medical data" or if once it went into the cloud it would become accessible to whomever
This panelist, Jack from Qualcomm, wants to create a lifetime countdown watch (In Time style) that tells us how much life we have left to live and if you eat McDonalds you cut down on some minutes/hours. If you do some Yoga it adds some time.