The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) and its research partner, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI), have issued Wellness 2030 – The New Techniques of Happiness report.
Created by renowned Swiss think-tank GDI, the report explores how future technologies will create a ‘wellness’ that looks entirely different to how we perceive it now.
The research takes an in-depth look at today’s happiness providers – the wellness industry – while offering a radical vision for the future, which includes biohackers becoming the new wellness pioneers and ‘data selfies’ that capture and project information about our inner emotional lives.
“This research is crucial for analysing how the global ‘Silicon Valley’ will shake up the wellness space and create entirely new players and concepts,” says Susie Ellis, GWI chairman and CEO. “New technologies and techniques of self-optimisation will transform the wellness market over the next dozen years.
“For instance, if humans have constantly tried to discover the key to happiness (using every tool they had access to), digitalisation has expanded the technical range of these tools and offers up individual metrics for happiness. We are on a quest to decode happiness.”
The report predicts that humans and technology will converge, and digitalisation will influence our habits, needs and desires. Biohackers – those open to crossing disciplinary lines to make things possible – will create shortcuts to wellbeing, liberating people from the limitations of nature, age and disease. Wearable tech, which currently collects data on everything from our heart rates to the calories we burn, may soon gather data on our emotions and happiness, offering insights in our total wellbeing.
Biofeedback technology, which measure our emotions, is set to make great strides. Apps are already attempting to track behavioural patterns and emotions and, the report suggests, will increasingly offer up very precise indications of a user’s mental and physical health.
The report calls for the wellness industry to have courage, to experiment like a hacker and to get ready for a data-driven future. Wellness needs to, it predicts, become an extension of the data economy, if it wants to decipher the needs and desires of its customers and create offers that match them.
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