Motivation-as-a-Service

At www.rudralabs.com we think about using Consumer IOT to solve real problems at scale.

The fundamental problem facing much of humanity today is not plague, crushing poverty or armed-conflict.

As a civilisation we are eating, drinking, snorting, sedating, smoking, sitting , worrying, and medicating ourselves into various physical and mental lifestyle diseases which did not exist a few decades ago years ago.

If we take the US, which is the beacon for the idea of development today:

• 35% of Adults are obese; there are more obese people than overweight people. The % of children who are obese has TRIPLED since the 70
• 40% of all adults, or over 100 Million folks are diabetic.
• 50% of adults are physically inactive, which means they did not do any physical exertion apart from that performed in going to work.
• Synthetic opioids like Fentanyl have made America’s opioid epidemic, even deadlier. In 2015, more than 52,000 people died of drug overdoses. In 2016, the total rose to more than 64,000.

Time Affluenza

I take inspiration from Affluenza, a portmanteau of Affluence and Influenza, Its "...a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more..."

We have too much time, too much comfort and do not know what to do with our life of plenty. I call this Time Affluenza.

With the impending rise of AI and the bots, billions of jobs will be eliminated, driving large swathes of "Humanity Hours" into needing fruitful deployment.

In 2025 we will have 7 Billion x 24 x 365 = 70 Trillion Humanity Hours to be deployed collectively as a species.

How do we help harness at scale this immense energy to live lives with maximal enjoyment of the process of life instead of eating, drinking, snorting, sedating, smoking, sitting, worrying and medicating ourselves into uselessness ?

Can governments intervene by taxes and other financial incentives ?

Yes. The UK government imposed a Sugar Tax recently, which increases the price of soft drinks based on sugar content. Sugar taxes have been imposed by other countries and while driving down sales, has not significantly contributed to solving the overall problem of "Time Affluenza"

We have to help ourselves, one individual at a time.

Self Help books, seminars and religion have helped, and perhaps even worked in some fashion so far. But an established way of driving positive behaviours at an individual level is via measurement and feedback loops using technology.

Smart Fitness Wearables: Big Business !

At heart all Smart Fitness wearable are self motivational devices.

The wearable fitness market essentially measures behaviour and makes this behaviour visible to the user of the device in various ways that cumulatively help her to maintain or improve that behaviour.

The inputs can be Machine to Human or Peer to Peer, Machine Mediated. The latter is broadly, gamification of peer data, so that individuals can compete with others in activity and competitions.

According to this report, the total value of the wearable fitness tracker industry will be close to 50 Billion USD in 2023. Fitbit is the the grand-daddy of this category, worth 1.5 Billion or 3 percent of the entire category.

We need more variety in lifestyle tracking

Many of the wearables measure whats easy to measure, such as walking and running. What if we could measure many different things with the same level of granularity that we measure our walking and running, such as:

• Sitting: Sitting has been called the New Smoking. As per some studies sitting for long hours is equivalent to smoking 16 cigarettes a day. I need a device which will measure how often and how much I sit.
• Hydration, drinking water is key to human potential. We need to drink 30 ML every 30 minutes, regularly and religiously.
• Eating: We need to measure the weight of everything we eat.

A case study: Smart Skipping Ropes:

What if a dumb skipping rope could actually measure how well and how often a person skips ? This idea is not new, a company called Tangram, which costs 129 USD, and completely dominating its category now.

The Tangram is sleek and engineered elegantly with a lot of love. But at 129 USD, the Tangram Smart Skipping rope will never be used by more than a very small fraction of the people who need it.

Our vision is that anybody, without the resources of a Apple or Amazon should be able to create their own variant of a Tangram, with their own secret sauce of motivational alerts, gamification and leader-boarding engine etc - quickly and efficiently.

With our platform, we believe that a Smart Skipping Rope can be built and sold at a price comparable or even lower than conventional Skipping Ropes.

The money isn't in the hardware it is in the Units of Motivation delivered -:)

Welcome to the new era of Motivation-as-a-Service by Consumer IOT Applications.

Let the Cambrian profusion begin.