Dr. Poppy Crum begs to differ with William Shakespeare and the many others who’ve waxed poetic about the portal-like quality of the human eye.
“We talk about the eye as the window to the soul,” says Crum, a neuroscientist and expert on the relationship between technological innovation and human evolution. “But, in fact, I believe they’ve got it wrong: The real window to our soul is our ear. It is the fastest place to read and write the brain. You can capture a cacophony of signatures just in the ear concha (bowl) that track a number of internal states.”
Crum, who serves as Chief Scientist at Dolby Laboratories and as an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, shared such insights and more during a keynote address this week at the virtually hosted OpenText World information-management conference.
Crum’s reference to the ear was part of a larger talk about the potential for technology to collect, analyze and use the personal data that our bodies give off — through our voices, skin, ears, body temperature, etc. — to enhance our well-being, better personalize our devices, and bring greater democracy to how we access and use technology.
“I call it the era of the empath,” she said. “Our technology will know more about us than it ever did. We have an opportunity to bridge divides, to connect in ways that we never have, and we have an opportunity to personalize our technology, to think about what it means to truly have a technology connect with an individual, support an individual, democratize a technology and enable capacity for everyone, not just for a few.”
Crum said it was important to understand a “very profound truth of human experience: we each have vastly different experiences of the exact same physical information.”
“We each experience the world vastly differently and we interact with our technology very differently. But we still build technology for one size fits all.”
This is changing, however. Crum said that advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and ubiquitous sensing will provide individuals with optimized and more customizable devices in future, improving what we know about our bodies and how we communicate to others via technology, such as video conferencing.
Which brings us back to the ear, which she describes as “a USB port between your body and the environment.”
“The power of merging these different sensors is really impactful because suddenly you have a device that is working for you and capturing, amalgamating the signatures in your ear. The microphone, a very inexpensive sensor, suddenly becomes a pairing of mental and physical wellness, paired with the internal physiological state of that user.”
Sensors that monitor our voices, our hearts and other parts and functions of the body will also use personal data to provide useful, proactive health information, she said.
“We radiate our stories,” she said. “We broadcast the signature of our emotions.”
“You’re seeing opportunities in personalized medicine at very low costs because of the convergence of consumer technology with an unprecedented opportunity of having longitudinal data of the individual.”
Which raises the question of privacy and data security.
“The third pillar that we have to advance is data privacy and trust in our technology making use of our personal data,” Crum said. “And that’s going to come through legislation and advances in the technology that supports that trust.”
This year’s OpenText World conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, 7,500 participants from 79 countries are registered for the four-day event, which ends Oct. 29. OpenText was founded and is headquartered in Waterloo, Ont.
Mindful of the transformational impact of the pandemic, the conference theme this year is “rethink the way we work.”
In a blog post just before the start of the conference, OpenText CEO and CTO Mark Barrenechea said this period is perfect for a “Great Rethink.”
“We must use this opportunity to rethink on a massive scale,” he wrote. “Rethink the nature of humanity and the evolution of our species on every level: economic, societal, technological, individual, environmental, educational, geopolitical, industries… Now is the time to accelerate digital transformation. Technology allows us to emerge stronger, faster and more resilient. We must rethink the way we work and live.”
