The last momoams was on January 25th and the theme was mobile health or mHealth. A topic that I hadn’t been in touch with before we started planning the event. Over the 2 months period prior to the event I discovered a new world full of great opportunities but along that also a world that raises a lot of questions. Of course there is a lot of smart technology involved in mHealth but the real interesting questions are the ones that deal with people.

The question that fascinates me -and to with there is no right answer (there are only possible scenario’s)- is how our mHealth is going to chance the social rules and interactions in our society.

It’s a question of what do we (want to) accept as a society and what not.

Think of using your mobile phone in public transport. Unimaginable 15 years ago, it was something you just didn’t do. In the meantime our social rules have changes rapidly and caught up with the technology.

With any technology the pattern of change is always the same. First comes a new technology, we start using it, social rules change and finally we regularize some of these rules in laws.

mHealth is a big bucket of almost anything that is new in health care. So to narrow it down I’m especially interested in monitoring your biometrics. This can be anything from your heart-rate, glucose level to the amount of endorphin in your blood. The reason why I think this particular development is so interesting is the fact that this is really personal data. If you’re talking about privacy, transparency and openness biometric data brings a whole new dimension to the discussion.

I did a little experiment during momoams by wearing a monitor that tweeted my heart-rate. Anyone in the audience (and on twitter) could connect with me on a different level then ever before. Did I look nervous when coming up on stage, maybe not so much but a heart-rate of 146 doesn’t lie. Does a heart-rate of 80 during a presentation of a speaker mean I’m bored?

Being able to connect with someone on such a deep level as your biometric data will change they way people interact with each other. A crowd that sees you’re heart-rate is rushing when you walk on stage will inevitable react different then a crowd that just sees your body language. This will create new social rules, what they will be it’s hard to predict but very interesting to think about.

I’d love to hear you’re scenarios!

If you want to catch a glimps of the Mobile Monday Amsterdam vibe enjoy the video below.

By the way something that struck me was that after a few minutes I totally forgot that I was wearing the heart-rate monitor. So I didn’t have the feel that I was being watched all the time.

The next momoams will be on March 29th and we’re going to explore every small thing that is connected to the internet but is not a mobile phone!