Our resident CTO, futurist, and marathoner Tim Saxe was featured in ECN Magazine’s recent panel on “What Will be the Must-Have Consumer Product of 2015“.

Of course, his opinion may be somewhat biased, but there is no doubt that makers of smartphones and wearables are working towards devices which as always-on, and always-aware.  They want devices that adapt to us (not the other way around).  Device OEMs benefit from a strong reliance on devices, carriers from increased bandwidth usage and user data, and advertisers from user data at a macro (or micro) level.

And users, of course, benefit in a great number of ways:

* Phones that will react to being in cars (i.e., shutting down the texting on the teenagers phone driving down Highway 101 at 80MPH in the early 90’s Honda with the flashy wheels, loud stereo, and engine sputtering through the chainsaw muffler)

* Wearables that produce accurate fitness assessments and recommendation– taking data on cadence of steps, altitude, speed, time sitting vs walking, intensity of heart rate, UV exposure and others, instead of a simple step count (which is the most basic of measurements)

* Tablets that can be used to measure living conditions, including your houses humidity levels, temperature, air quality, etc…

…and a whole host of other applications just now being conceived.