The Cyborg Evolution
We're becoming co-dependant!
Today we're going to talk about the increasingly interconnected relationship between humans and biosensing devices. This is important background on understanding how neurotech fits into the greater scheme of things, especially in the consumer sector. Understanding this overall trend is vital to answer: why do we build neurotech? why should we invest in neurotech? how does neurotech fit into consumer tech in general? how will the relationship between neurotech and society change in the next 10 years?
Some think Cyborgs are a thing of sci-fi, but our dependence on technology has already made many humans cyborgs.
What are Cyborgs?
Some still see cyborgs as a thing of science fiction or marvel, with humans having smart augmentations which drastically increase their capabilities.
But look around- technology’s grip on us says otherwise. Cyborgs are already living all around us- you probably even fit the definition yourself. Many of us are participating in the transition without realising it.
Cyborgs can be thought of as humans with both mechanical and biological components, often with high-tech enhancements.
As our technological capabilities as a society have improved, we have begun to meet this definition through a few different approaches. From life-altering neural implants used by people with disabilities to enhance their capabilities, to everyday gadgets that subtly enhance our lives, the line between human and machine is blurring.
In special cases, people represent cyborgs in a classical way: disabled or ill populations who need it use advanced neural implants and smart prosthetic enhancements to enable direct communication with machines or devices. These augmentations dramatically improve their quality of life.
Popular examples here include:
Invasive BCIS (like Neuralink or BrainGate) which can help people to interact with a computer with a dysfunctional motor system.
Smart prosthetics (eg SmartArm) which allow for improved control of replaced body parts
However, cyborg-style augmentations are not only used to help people recover normal abilities.
As new technologies have become more and more integrated into our lives, we’re all slowly transitioning into cyborgs.
For most of us, the transformation has been less about overcoming disability and more about exceeding our natural capabilities. We haven’t received implants or direct augmentations to try and restore normalcy.
Instead, we have focussed on extending human capabilities.
When we are sick for example, we now use cutting-edge treatments to understand what is going on inside of the body and global and molecular scales- the tech enabling this has completely revolutionised our approach to health. We have drastically upgraded our diagnostic and treatment capabilities, using tech to understand what’s happening in the body at depths that would have previously been entirely sci-fi: 7T MRIs, portable ultrasound, large scale mRNA vaccines- all highlight how far we’ve come. These innovations also represent our constant efforts to know more, develop faster, scale cheaper, and produce more accurate recordings.
Technological advancements have integrated so deeply into our lives that they've begun to augment our daily functions.
In mere decades, we have gone from landline phones and desktop computers to Siri and smartwatches. Let’s take ‘Sarah’ as a fictional character, inspired by many customer interviews I’ve conducted, to explore this shift from a user perspective.
Sarah likely has access to a portable laptop and a smartphone, with immediate access to the entire internet.
She likely also uses the GPS monitor built into her phone to understand where she is on a map. Her IMU movement sensor, built into her phone, can tell her how many steps she has gone in a day.
Sarah responds well to being able to track her steps and finds that it helps her keep on top of a basic health metric: how sedentary or active she is.
To find out more, she begins wearing a smartwatch. She can now also use the PPG sensor in her watch to track many more physiological metrics. She knows that this is not medical-grade, but appreciates that it gives her many more insights than not regularly wearing a sensor. Additionally, she likes that she now doesn’t miss notifications- she gets them delivered straight to her watch so that she is always up to date.
Sarah’s journey and experiences exemplify the overall consumer trend: most people like to be more connected. Collectively, we have consistently developed and bought new tech to increase our access to the internet, each other, and our physiological metrics.
Although they may not be physically embedded (yet), their constant presence in our lives and our reliance on them mimic a form of integration that’s cyborg-esque in its own right.
This reliance is only deepening as wearable technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and widespread. In 2023, the leap to almost 220 million (!!!) smartwatch users worldwide signalled a growing readiness to embrace devices that promise to monitor, analyse, and optimise our biological data.
As this trend continues, we’ll see more people wearing new biosensing and augmented hardware. In fact, we can already see devices and investments in this area by major tech companies, where developments include rings (first Oura, now Samsung and Apple), glasses (Meta’s raybands and Google’s glass) and headphones (LG, patents filed by Meta and Apple).
These new systems are designed to gather insights ranging from sleep patterns to heart rates to mental state, all aimed at expanding Sarah’s access to new metrics and enhancing our health and well-being.
Having all this data at our fingertips has made monitoring not only popular but also profoundly empowering for the user. In a society which prioritises health and performance, understanding, self-experimenting, and ‘manipulating’ our data is unsurprisingly adored. For the first time, humans can have a good understanding of their, personal, longitudinal physiology.
We seek insights tailored to our individual lives, goals, and physiology. It becomes a natural, tangible, and (some would say) inevitable evolution of our species, driven by the desire not just to use technology, but to squeeze it for everything it’s worth to drastically improve our circumstances.
As new and improved personalised, integrated, and more permanent biosensors become available and enable these insights, our dependency on the tech will continue to grow.
As we subconsciously check our metrics, habitually put on our smartwatch when we wake up, or stand up in response to a notification, the transition from human to ‘cyborg’ is already be well underway.
My name is Abby Holland. I am a Product Owner at IDUN Technologies, a consumer neurotech company building EEG-augmented headphones. I have been building in the space since 2018, and have a background in BioMechanical Engineering and Clinical Neuroscience. Follow me on Twitter @holland_neuro for realtime commentary on new neurotech developments.
Just based off a few conversations I've had recently, I think giving patients data driven insights for them to make their own decisions, rather than giving strictly clinicians only therapy-relevant insights, is a good path forward for these devices to lead to functional improvements. In a similar vein to what you're suggesting, that can then expand to giving the general consumer their own insights. I think when designing this tech it's really important to think about who it's serving, and give them as much control as you can. End users shouldn't be treated like they're incompetent, we can work with them to give them a new skill. That way we increase human agency and let people take charge/improve their own lives