Smart ageing

Extended, monitored and optimised life

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we portray the proliferation of life-extending services. People may live for longer due to general improvements in medical science and through the success of specific scientific methods for the extension of life. Asthese services could likely be unevenly distributed, we will find some people in a state of perpetual life extension. We illustrate circumstances where although people will not live forever, people may find themselves in the unusual situation of having extended life plans rather than decreasing.

We also consider the blending of healthcare with wellbeing and an increasing association with human behaviour and lifestyle choices. The consequent targeting of behaviour change for prevention may allow non-traditional health providers to dominate the market and shift the power to the private sector with the use of advanced monitoring technologies to quantify all aspects of life and nudge people in the right direction.

The context that may emerge is an environment with a heightened focus on what people value about life —Quality or Quantity?

We explore the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character who we created based on our research with real people.

What might that mean for Robert?

For people like Robert, their happiness is dependent on the capability of their bodies to allow them the life they want. We explore how services may evolve around these insecurities.

You have to stay on top of your body if it’s going to carry on working for you. Staying younger for longer also means staying older for longer.

Robert retired four years ago after spending his career in the financial sector, having worked in London and New York with large and small companies. He grew restless after a few months of retirement as it made him feel old. He decided to purchase his first road bike, a Bianchi Specialissima. Riding began to give him knee pain, so he preventatively began to invest in platelet-rich plasma and bone marrow concentration injections. He talked to a doctor about knee enhancements. And he is enthusiastic about future health tech.

He finds his greatest happiness in cycling, which has become a mix of exercise and meditation. The rhythm is like a trance that lets him forget his worries. Life is too short to pretend to be someone else, and he has the power to choose who he is and how he spends his time. He is worried about the quality of the end of his life.

His goals

Robert’s goals are to slow down and pay attention to the moments that matter while also discovering new passions to explore later in life. He always aims to keep healthy and active, so he never becomes obsolete.

For Robert, his body is a means to lead the life he wants. He has to balance living how he wants to with living in a way that preserves his health.

Explorations in ‘Smart ageing’

We explore the future in this scenario by looking for potential points of friction between this context of ‘smart ageing’ and the needs of someone like Robert. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

Find out how we ‘created the framework for future thinking’.

Dignitime

Dignitime quantifies the life expectancy cost of all your actions and relates them to how happy they make you. Based on these choices, Dignitime can show you a score for how you value the time you have left. How would you decide between things that are harmful but make you happy and things that are healthy but make you less happy?

DigniTime can also predict health issues that might stand in the way of how you live and prepare you accordingly. When things go wrong, you can see how your priorities have changed over time and recommend alternative sources of happiness.

Team: The Lab

Emerging topics

Through these explorations, we can foresee services that quantify previously abstract attributes of life, bringing new insight to people and allowing more informed decision making about the course, length and quality of their life. However, if such decisions can be made meaningfully, is there an inherent indignity in living a life so shaped by algorithms? Interesting characteristics may emerge based on people’s decisions to lead shorter, more intense lives versus longer, steadier ones. We may find new lines of conflict in our decision making. Rather than health vs happiness, people may derive happiness from a deeper connection to their health and bodies. The influence of these new capacities to decide may be dwarfed by the potential for these profound scores to reframe our perceptions of the value of our lives.

While some services may emerge to manage our behaviour and decision making other services may develop to offer alternative choices. Instead of living an experience that may have a high cost to your health, you live it through simulations,aising topics around how services will provide authentic yet simulated experiences.

Services such as Portal extend the notion of ‘celebrity instagrammer’ where ‘Followers’ could live through the subjects they follow in far more real ways. Instagrammers are already guided by their followers. In the future, new relationships may emerge where people may prefer to experience or guide the subject’s event either alone or as part of a crowd.

These explorations portray services that may support or challenge how people balance their quality of life, and they also depict new ways to have experiences that may equally make us consider what we value in a quality life.

Related to ‘Smart Ageing’

Propositions

Yolt

Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

Propositions

Qualitime

Qualitime helps you track how everything you do influences your happiness and your life expectancy so that you can decide what is most important to you.

Smart ageing

Extended, monitored and optimised life

People’s life expectancy may seem to perpetually extend without people knowing when death may come. Living with an ageing body will be a longer part of life, and therefore illness is even more problematic. People may dedicate more of their life to extending their lives.

How the scenario could unfold

What might that mean for Robert?

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Scenarios

Personal control

Dimensions of change