Nearest Enhancements – Better Gear, Clothes and Nutrients

Neutraceuticals for longevity are not released yet, but will be released soon according to Gregory Benford at his presentation at the Covergence conference of last year.

Video here

Genescient is testing a longevity product in Bangalore later in 2009.

Genescient’s first longevity product — to be ready for human trials later this year — will be tested at a laboratory in Bangalore. Genescient’s patent advisor also is an Indian.

The company uses directed evolution techniques — molecular biology methods that mimic natural evolution in laboratory conditions — to produce long-lived animals. The genomics of these animals are used to find critical pathways to longevity. “Using those, we find substances, some from traditional Indian medicine, interestingly, to devise pills to enhance the longevity pathways we already have. Those are our first products — arrived at by further testing on animals, to be sure they work and have no bad side effects,” he says.

The other aspect is that fixing micronutrient deficiency will probably prevent our lives from being shorter and less healthy.

Gear Enhancement

The iphone sniper buddy

Wired discusses using exercise monitoring devices that link to iPhones and iPods that are being used to improve workouts and to help people get better results. The help is better motivation and by using the tracking information to make better workouts. 10% improvement in Gym retention. Nike has 1.5 million people tracking their workouts and they claim the data helps motivate people to exercise more.

5 Exercise Tools

Garmin Forerunner 310XT
Garmin’s latest GPS watch uses wireless ANT+ and networking to send data straight to your desktop. Plus, it’s waterproof, so you can splish-splash without a crash.
$350, garmin.com

Training Peaks 3.0
Training Peaks sucks up data from dozens of fitness devices and reports back with visualizations of heart rate, power output, speed, distance, elevation, and much more.
$119/year, trainingpeaks.com

RunKeeper Pro
Turn your iPhone into a mobile fitness center. Using the GPS chip in 3G iPhones, this app tracks speed and distance and lets you upload and share your routes on the company’s site.
$10, runkeeper.com

WeEndure
Performance monitoring meets Web 2.0 trash talk. This social network not only logs your data, it also shows your friends’ numbers so you can “comment” on their workouts.
$20/year, weendure.com

SMHeart Link
This little gadget syncs with your favorite exercise gear — heart rate monitors, power meters, even fitness equipment — and sends the data back to your iPhone or iPod Touch wirelessly.
$125, smheartlink.com

Future Wearable and Super Gear Enhancement

Here is a longer version of my theory of wearable enhancement.

Things like the iphone and electronics or performance enhancing clothes (like the olympic swimsuit) are going to make more rapid progress. They will have a less regulatory delays to distribution.

Key enabling features:
* Always on (needs lower power usage and efficiency)
* Always available (no bootup delays)
* Always in context
– gathering info from passive sensors means devices are ready to be triggered or will auto trigger
– lot of universal memory means no context switching delays
* Vastly increased array of very cheap and very effective sensors
* Personal LADAR (laser radar, which is key device for enable self driving robot cars)
* More on chip devices (on chip super accurate atomic clocks which enables more accurate GPS
* Power harvestors

The vision is not iron man but flexible elextronics and carbon/polymer and suit man with a super network of gadgets and tiny and cheap sensors.


Wearable workstations with heads up display goggles

There are exoskeletons and those will become less rare, but the number of people who will have superdevices like an goggle display- iPhone 8.0 or competing gear will be hundreds of millions when the number of exoskeletons will be trying to get to the first million deployments. Many of the iPhone 8.0 person will have some in-clothing electronics and some performance enhancing clothing from Nike.