Weaving Digital Dreams and Innovation

In my last post I chucked in a throw away line about how Adoption of Wearable Technology would probably be driven by the Insurance Industry. I was actually thinking about something I saw on one of the vendors for Digital Health Platforms who had cheerily suggested that a Use Case for the technology might be monitoring drivers to ensure that they were not falling asleep at the wheel. A bit Big Brother in concept, but the industry is trying other things such as in car breathalyzers and monitoring individual people's driving habits to determine risk and set their premiums.

Anyway, whilst I was thinking whimsically about what someone from outside the insurance industry might do to disrupt the insurance market, some things clicked into place. If an insurance company were to partner with Rythm, the developer of the Dreem headset for monitoring and improving sleep, they could jointly go to market with, say, a 20% discount on driving insurance for drivers who buy and use the headset. Improved sleep should lead to improved concentration and less accidents. So a driver who uses a Dreem headset, should in principle be a safer driver.

Then I read a paper produced by Firstbeat Technologies, about their method of monitoring hear rate variability and its use in monitoring stress and recovery, which has applications in exploring health and well-being to support possible lifestyle changes. The paper states that it is difficult to monitor brain actvity in the long term, however the Dreem Headset does this so the 2 technologies could be combined to assist in improving general health. Again this would be an opportunity for selling discounted life insurance, based on expected improvement in user's lifestyle and health.

Then there would be further opportunities in general corporate insurance for industries involving use of potentially dangerous machinery and operation of sophisticated plan. If employees were required to use these products, overall outcomes in operating oil platforms, nuclear power plant, chemical factories, airliners, trains, trucks etc. should be better. This shoud produce a Win-Win-Win-Win situation:

• lower premiums to the corporate customers and less fall out from less incidents,
• more sales by the insurer from lower prices and less costs from payouts,
• reduced societal risk from reduced frequency of major incidents,
• better health and life expectancy for employees and the opportunity to access lower cost personal insurance     

So, it's not all big brother. It could be quite progressive.