EmTech Preview: David Icke of MC10 on the Revolution in Fitness and Health Tools

MC10 imagines bendable, wearable electronics that will give everyday athletes the training knowledge of Olympians.

Laura Janes Wilsonarchive page

July 26, 2012

David Icke, CEO of MC10, wants you to feel like an Olympian. The company wants to provide users with sophisticated knowledge to fuel individual fitness and improve health, all through wearable electronics.

During a TEDMED talk this past spring, Icke lamented that electronics for fitness and medicine haven’t experienced the rapid innovation seen in computing and communications. Icke envisions unobtrusive technology that is worn on, and even in, our bodies. “What if electronics conformed to us, instead of us conforming to them? … Reshaping electronics will change medicine and advance [our] quality of life,” he says.

MC10 has announced a Sports Advisory Board of respected professional athletes to help shape the next generation of athletic performance monitoring devices. (Read more on this group here.) “MC10’s groundbreaking technology will provide athletes of all stripes with critical performance information that will inform the way we all train and compete,” said Grant Hill of the NBA’s LA Clippers.

Icke’s presentation from TEDMED can be seen here:

The biggest opportunity offered by wearable electronics, he claims, is to unlock the mysteries of human biology so that we understand what makes us sick, and what expands our capacities. “Imagine what we don’t know today that we will learn from a closer look at our systems, which is possible when sensing and computing electronics conform to us,” he says.

Technology Review wrote about the self-quantification movement in its July/August cover story, “The Measured Life,” by Emily Singer.

David Icke is speaking at Technology Review’s annual EmTech MIT conference this October.

The conference will further explore the next wave of personal quantification: genomics. A forthcoming post will preview speakers who will share new ways that gene sequencing technologies are enabling personal genomics to redefine medicine.