Innovation vs. Novelty, the role of the Slap-Chop, Wearable-Tech and your local GP

In the tech-space, the never-ending conveyor-belt of new product features is bamboozling, even to the most experienced software marketing teams. I’ve often sat on a webinar, seen a product demo or read an article which has caused me serious FOMO (Fear of missing out). The problem we face is, novelty sells, novelty differentiates business’s and competing products and sometimes, novel-features are just cool!

In my own experience, the other month, I spent 30 dollars on buying my mum a Slap-Chop (Sounds wrong I know! It’s this thing here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGn2Egekic) unsurprisingly it hasn’t yet slapped it’s first carrot or onion 6 months on…

But back to the world of technology and software, the real problem is, novelties pose a bigger problem than just wasting our money. As we get swept up in the temporarily interesting and tempting new-thing, we can all to easily and all so often get side-tracked and have our original vision of what’s really important distorted. That’s why I’ve written the below, my own personal take on;

“In a world where novelty sells so well, what does real innovation look like?”.

We will be looking at the not-so-distant future of wearable tech and the role of our GP’s to answer this.

It’s widely cited that through the advances made in wearable-tech, the role of our GP’s (in only the next 7 years!) could be vastly different, if not redundant, sounds dramatic I know, but let me explain…

Picture this, you’re feeling unwell, you’re bunged-up and have a sore throat, so you visit your local Docs;

GP: “How long have you felt like this?”

You: “Well it’s hard to be exact, what with the kids running around and this thing with work and the fact I was hungover on Sunday morning, maybe 10, 11 days or so?”.

Not a whole lot of useful information your poor GP has to work with here right?

The alternative (the future?)

GP: “How long have you felt like this?”

You: “Well my smart-watch has analysed a plethora of my own biometric data over the past 90 days, running 24/7, and here’s the report, it looks like my sleeping pattern was affected at this date and I was consuming less calories here also and, and, and…”

You get it. Okay so big deal, we can use data to better describe our symptoms, but what about prescriptions and the success of medicines on your ailments?

GP: “Try this and if it works, great! If not, come back and see me in a fortnight”.

The future you: “Doc, I’m sending through my latest bio-metric report, we can see here that since taking the medicine, I am breathing better, sleeping better and showing less signs of stress, it’s worked a treat, thanks!”

Tech 1, Human GP’s 0. But that’s only half-time.

As much as accurate, no-bias large sets of data can do an unrivalled job of reading us, there’s something wearable tech can never and will never be able to do, which our GP’s can.

We’re humans and that means we all need the reassurance of experts, we need to feel listened to and we're not ever going to get that from a piece of expensive plastic on our wrists. Tech will never be able to substitute the human empathy and mini-counselling session we each get every time we sit down with our GPs. Furthermore, GP’s know who we are, GP’s show care and attention and GP’s can give us advice not necessarily learnt from textbooks in medicine school.

The point, when long-term, task-specific tech is used in conjunction with the best of Human nature, real, sustainable, innovation happens.

In this example, I certainly hope that over next few years we will be able to harness the best of technology and the best of our GP’s, to allow us to understand and communicate our own health better and free up more time of our currently overly-busy, over worked and hugely important medical professionals, to enable them to spend more time doing what they do best, listening to us and fixing us.

Whatever software or tech we are considering buying for our organisations, we need to focus on task-specific functionality that offers us better insight into our own organisations and enables us to spend more time doing whatever it is that we do best.

Now, that’s what’s I call innovation!