Most people in cities want access to a car but some people can’t afford to own one. More likely, people that own a car don’t have anywhere safe to put it at night and sometimes they need a different type of car. So what if a retailer with some car parking spaces teamed up with a car sharing business and allowed customers to pick up and drop off cars in their car parks outside peak hours? If you’re not already familiar with car sharing clubs they’re already a US $15 million market in the US which is expected to grow10-fold in the next 5 years. In Switzerland 2% of drivers already use such schemes while in the UK car clubs like Smart Moves lend cars to people for about GB £15 per month. Servicing, breakdown recovery and road taxes are all included and users just pay about GB £3 per hour plus GB £0.18 per mile.
Car sharing
Reply
Products such as TiVo allow users to time shift their TV viewing habits. Similarly, Apple’s i-Pod, like Sony’s Walkman before it, allows users to shift their music listening to any place they like. So what if, in the future, you could be in two places at the same time or physically travel backwards or forwards in time? This is pure science fiction of course, but science and technology are allowing us to literally look back and forward in time, for example to identify future genetic time-bombs inside our bodies.
The 1918-19 flu pandemic killed somewhere in the region of 50-100 million people. Whatever the figure it was almost certainly greater than the number of people killed during World War 1. Most experts agree that another epidemic is overdue, possibly not on the same scale, but devastating to at least our mental state nevertheless. On a slightly related note, expect to see a return to some old-fashioned diseases and conditions in the future — gout and rickets for example.
The flip side of the happiness trend is unhappiness, and in particular loneliness and depression. And depression is linked to all kinds of other problems. For example, a study by Brown Medical School (US) found that men who suffer from depression increase their risk of heart disease by 12% (and if they’re pessimists, the risk increases by 18%). Is this a real trend caused by the likes of individualism, living alone, and social exclusion (lack of community) or is it just that people have got time to think about themselves too much these days? Once upon a time depression was just part of the human condition. In the future it will, increasingly, be treated as an illness.
In the future, patients will demand 24/7 access to their full medical records. In some cases they will even carry them around on their person (i-Pods for your medical history?). Links with the growth in mobile medical devices.
The ageing trend is a megatrend that will have enormous influence on healthcare in the future as people not only live longer (life expectancy is expected to be 100+ by 2020 for many countries) but expect to be well for longer too. Obvious impacts include higher expenditure on pharmaceuticals and care for the elderly which are already at record levels in the US (healthcare spending in the US was US $1.7 trillion in 2003), but the type of diseases we’ll see will also change. We’ve already seen voice lifts and other forms of anti-ageing surgery. Expect to see more R&D dollars put behind things like memory recovery and enhancement and the replacement of body parts. Also expect to see more debate about subjects like euthanasia.
Increasing hospitalisation and treatment costs, together with developments in remote monitoring and wireless communications, will create a boom in home based monitoring, diagnosis and treatment. This trend will also be driven by the rise in the number of people aged 65+ that are quite literally clogging up hospitals (there has been a 155% increase in the number of Americans being treated for heart failure in the US, not because of an increased disease rate but simply because people are living for longer). A good example of such self-diagnosis or treatment is the Philips Heart Start Automatic External Defibrillator (AED). That’s right, your very own personal defibrillator available from amazon.com for US $ 1,495. The price might give a few people a heart attack but at least they can treat themselves.