Pregnant? Ask Google!

Yesterday, I attended one of the meanwhile popular “Future Internet” workshops. I ended up in a group tasked to picture how people will use the Internet in say 10-15 years from now and what services / technologies are driving the future Internet or can be expected to be invented. We came up with many interesting ideas; one of them was centered around the question how people will find out whether they are pregnant…

Well, they ask Google! Seriously, we can reasonably assume that there will be many networked sensors around us. And it is not unrealistic to assume that sensors will be installed in water closets so that health related data can be automatically collected and processed by some health monitoring service. And since health data has value, it is not unlikely that a company like Google is interested in having this data.

And since we are talking about future Internet services: Once a person has determined to be pregnant, he/she might use the Life Playback Service to figure out with whom he/she gets the baby…