Fatigue, irritability, and much, much more!

Since the Nissan old suit, I've been curious about other wearable simulators. Check this out...

The Empathy Belly® Pregnancy Simulator | Image: Birthways, Inc.

"The Empathy Belly"® Pregnancy Simulator lets you know what it feels like to be pregnant! It is a multi-component, weighted "garment" that will -- through medically accurate simulation -- enable men, women, teenage girls and boys to experience over 20 symptoms and effects of pregnancy, including:

• Weight gain of 30 pounds (13.6 kg.)
• Fetal kicking and stroking movements
• Shallow breathing and shortness of breath
• Increased blood pressure, pulse and body temperature
• Bladder pressure and frequency of urination
• Low backaches; shift in center of gravity; waddling
• Fatigue, irritability, and much, much more!

"About The Belly"

Is this for real, I wondered? Turns out that, yes, it is...

"I wish you were pregnant for a day," she said. "Just to feel what it’s like!"

Millions of women have expressed similar fantasies to their husbands and boyfriends, which explains the ongoing success of "The Empathy Belly" pregnancy simulator.
[...]
As an educational tool, the Empathy Belly has numerous applications.

Hollywood uses it to train actresses preparing for pregnant roles, although the suits are too cumbersome to wear during actual scenes.

Ford Motor Co. engineers have worn them to design more pregnant-friendly cars, and sociologists have used them to study attitudes about pregnancy in the workplace.

Hospitals use the belly to give expecting fathers a taste of the physical and psychological impact of pregnancy. And it is also widely used with teenage boys and girls to encourage celibacy (or birth control).

The simulator is meant to be worn for only 30 minutes. In order to wear it for more than three hours in an unsupervised environment, I had to sign multiple health waivers.
[...]
My wife squeezes my fake body parts and is amused to see me walk like Baby Huey, the oversized cartoon duck. Mission accomplished. But she also notes I am not experiencing any heartburn (her archnemesis) or water retention in my legs and ankles. She’s absolutely correct, but a suit like this could never 100 percent duplicate her experience.
[...]
Overall, simulated motherhood wasn’t too much of an ordeal until the evening, when Stacy convinced me to sleep in the suit for "the full experience." I took her advice and grabbed a couch cushion to use as a body pillow. Resting on my back for the first time, it felt like a rhino was stomping on my stomach in hiking boots.

I spent the entire night shifting between three different positions: laying on my right or left sides and propped up sitting against the couch cushion. Each time I switched positions, I felt the rhino’s boots kick in again. And I asked myself: How do pregnant women get any serious sleep?

Answer: They often don’t.

~Darren Garnick, "Labor of love: Dad tries 'Belly' on for size", Boston Herald, 9 July 02007.

Garnick's 24 hours of simulated pregnancy earned him a measure of notoriety. Other men have since taken up the challenge, for instance, the hosts of Internet TV show Dadlabs; "An edgy, fun and Informative show for dads and the women who tolerate and/or love them".


(Video posted 2 April 02008.)

Meanwhile, the same company can also outfit you to get a feel for the adverse health effects of heavy smoking, with "The Empathy Lungs"™ C.O.P.D. Simulator -- C.O.P.D. stands for "Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (which is comprised primarily of Emphysema and/or Chronic Bronchitis), as well as Asthma and Lung Cancer."



Although like all infomercials it verges on self-parody, to me this really is a fascinating intervention. A couple of observations made during the video by Empathy Lungs co-inventor Linda Ware:

Both I, and the professionals I interviewed, all agreed on one fact: that whatever wrongdoing or self-destructive behaviour people are engaged in, be it smoking, drinking too much, overeating until they're obese etc, people are experts at rationalising and staying in denial about how much harm they are causing themselves.
[...]
Given this pervasive denial of smokers, and knowing as an educator that experience is a much more persuasive teacher than just words, I set out to develop a device that would simulate the experience of C.O.P.D. to let smokers get a sneak preview of the probable future if they kept smoking.
[...]
The Empathy Lungs is a multi-component garment, put on only by a professional in the medical, educational, or social service fields. It is designed to be worn once by each person, for as little as ten minutes, in an office or classroom setting. In a medically accurate manner, the Empathy Lungs realistically simulates ten of the physical and emotional symptoms of C.O.P.D.
[...]
The exciting thing about the Empathy Lungs is that, since it gives people an experience that is tangible, here-and-now, visceral and emotional, it gets past the wall of denial. You put it on someone, and suddenly they feel debilitated, handicapped, and sick. Then, even after just ten minutes, you take it off of them, and they are elated that the C.O.P.D. wasn't real -- this time.

The Empathy Belly and Empathy Lungs each simulate physiological states that in some cases represent genuine future possibilities for the wearer, and in other cases might be used by parties seeking a more empathic (Greek: empatheia "passion", from en- "in" + pathos "feeling") comprehension of the lives of others -- for instance, the belly for fathers-to-be; the lungs for families of elderly smokers. In relation to the pregnancy simulator, the verisimilitude of the suit may be less important than the heuristic value of encountering the "shape" of the experience, so to speak; not to mention the social importance of simply being willing to try it on. This certainly seems to be the case with the men who wore the belly in public -- both Garnick's article and the Dadlabs show emphasise, if light heartedly, the extremely positive response from women to their daring.

Both these outfits prompt me to spend more time considering the values and limitations of "embodied foresight" generally. For me, the specific bodily states (old age, pregnancy, ill health) stand as examples of a "wearable" approach of thinking and feeling ahead, which can also be accomplished by other kinds of intervention. Simulated and vicarious experiences of possible futures range from thought experiments, to films, to participatory exercises and games, through to -- some day soon -- direct neural interface; all these and more can be located on a continuum of foresight (or rather foresense) activities.

Now, the particular uses that existing simulation suits may be put to are bound to vary, of course, and I'm less enthused by some than others. For instance, I'm not especially keen on the Empathy Belly being used to scare teenagers into not having sex. Then again, maybe ten minutes in a "harrassed parent of a pregnant teenager" suit would change my mind.

The future according to Microsoft

Institute for the Future's Vivian Distler says:

At last month's Mix08 conference, Microsoft played a video created by its Office Labs to share their vision of the future of personal health management It features ubiquitous integrated displays, instant sharing of information, projecting displays, and other advances in natural interface interactions.

A little digging turned up some background on the video, by Dr Bill Crounse, Microsoft’s Worldwide Health Senior Director:

This is the third [Health Future Vision] video we have produced here at Microsoft. It has been my pleasure to work closely with Ian Sands and his Industry Innovations Group (IIG) to bring these videos to life. What's particularly interesting is how accurate the videos have been in predicting future industry trends and how technology will influence the way we work. Perhaps that's because IIG does so much internal and external research before producing one of these videos. We also base them on technology that is either currently available but not widely implemented, or on technology that is being actively pursued in the labs at Microsoft Research. In any event, everything you see in the video is based on technology that is available now, or is very likely to be available within a 7 to 12 year time frame.

Our newest Future Vision Video also captures the essence of healthcare industry trends that I've been following and writing about for the last few years. This includes the rising tide of consumerism in healthcare, the retail movement, commoditization of services, information everywhere, and globalization.
[...]
I think the video accurately reflects the kind of consumer-directed, quality and price transparent, knowledge-driven healthcare delivery system we'd all like to see. And while this is just a video, it certainly captures the essence for how information technology will help transform medical practice to better connect people and data, facilitate improved collaboration, and better inform everyone involved.

~Bill Crounse, "Future Vision: Microsoft knowledge driven health", HealthBlog, 2 August 02007

So, a few points of interest about this clip.

First, the release: this was not officially distributed by the company for public consumption (as Crounse notes); instead it was ripped from the Mix08 conference webcast and posted to YouTube by a user. Not quite sure what to make of that fact, but it piques my curiosity about the company's strategy for these sorts of futures visualisations. Also, I don't know where -- or whether -- the previous two videos can be found, but if they are already (or later become) available, I'd like to hear from anyone who can point me to them.

Second, the genre: I don't recall noticing the phrase "concept video" before today (that's how this piece is described by Long Zheng at his tech blog I Started Something, one of the top sources of hits to the YouTube clip) but that term also describes several other odds and ends recently dredged up here at the sceptical futuryst (the Morph, the Charmr), so we now have another way to scan for futures videos of this type.

And last, but by no means least, the content: I can't comment on this in too much detail right now, but to my mind, the scenario this video portrays is profoundly soporific. Everything is as spotless and anodyne as in Huxley's Brave New World (or for that matter, Kubrick's 2001 -- the grim joke there being that the computer HAL proved the most recognisably human character in the film.) Sure, those blobjects look cool, the user interfaces are fluid and pretty, the houses are tidy... but the experience it all evokes is (to me; feel free to disagree) D-U-L-L.

Dr Crounse: "I think the video accurately reflects the kind of consumer-directed, quality and price transparent, knowledge-driven healthcare delivery system we'd all like to see."

Tonto to the Lone Ranger: "Who's 'we', paleface?"

Several years ago, working for the United Kingdom's National Health Service coordinating a symposium on the futures of healthy communities, was really the first occasion I'd had to think about the underlying values and practices of Western medicine. My academic background had been in the history and philosophy of science, and in law, rather than in medicine or healthcare. During that project, I found that the organising concept of "healthy communities" (which had been attached to it before I came aboard) lent itself very well to engaging the idea of health as an emergent property of a community ecology, rather than as a product of merely instrumental bodily interventions. I came to suspect that our chronic medical ills, and probably our social ones also, relate to a simplistic, mechanistic worldview. When bodies and institutions are designed and maintained principally by engineers and scientists, the world looks very different from how it can where other views hold sway.

So, back to the video: certainly, I think we should concede that, if the clip's evocation of healthcare were to be broadly realised, it would represent a great improvement over many people's current experience of hospitals. But that may say more about the troubled state of the Western medical paradigm than it does about the shiny, but essentially shallow, vision proposed by Microsoft.

Now, I found while reading up on the health video that Microsoft's Industry Innovations Group has also tried its hand at imagining the future of banks, with the following result:


(Found via Microsoft and the Future blog.)

Same vibe. These videos show us doing the same things more efficiently, not doing different things. The near future is much like today, if you live in an advertisement: everything is clean, there are no crowds or other inconveniences, and -- hey presto! -- you have more, and cooler, gadgets (-- again with the gadgets!) These clips are unobjectionable and, arguably, boring -- by design. They aim to reassure (with our help, your life in the future will be simpler, smoother, more elegant) in exactly the way we should expect from a massive enterprise with most to gain from maintaining a steady course. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not Microsoft-bashing -- after all, it is a technology company, whose function is not to tell us what the future should be, but to find ways to realise visions and priorities that we describe for ourselves.

Which is why we really need to figure out for ourselves what those visions and priorities ought to be. Pointing out some of the limitations and inbuilt blindspots of the continued-growth visions proposed by some of the entities responsible for shaping the conditions of possibility for our lives is just one way to begin a conversation which aspires to go much, much further.

It comes down to inventing and pursuing the future according to you.