Need to Know
29 : 01 : 21

Amsterdam – Design studio H-O-TT's conceptual furniture range doubles as fitness equipment for homebodies.

The Furfit collection presents five ways that furniture could serve a dual purpose as gym equipment, opening up the potential of home workouts for people with limited living space. The designs include a high stool that can be turned on its side and used as a curl barbell and a side table that doubles as a kettlebell.

With gyms remaining closed in many countries, Furfit is a response to the rise in makeshift at-home gym kit, taking instead a design-centric approach. Luca Beltrame, founder of H-O-TT, explains: ‘Living in a typical Dutch apartment, the space to work out wasn't generous, so we started to think about a way to upscale our living room and find an active use for the pieces of furniture that were otherwise limiting our movements.’

People’s home environments have taken on new purposes during the pandemic, prompting a wave of Fulfilment Furnishings that place wellbeing at the fore.

Canada – The Eli device offers sophisticated at-home hormone testing to give women greater insight into their health.

Aiming to help women make informed decisions and avoid unnecessary medication or invasive procedures, its device and corresponding app take a two-fold approach to tracking users' daily hormone profiles. Using a saliva sample, the small device captures hormone levels, working in tandem with a smartphone app to visualise data from the sample and deliver daily insights personalised to each user's health profile.

While the app can be used to track fertility, the start-up has wider ambitions for its technology, hoping to offer women a longitudinal hormone dataset at every life stage, from puberty to menopause. ‘Hormones are core to women's fertility and general health, yet they remain a black box. We are unlocking that box and empowering women to have access to their own hormone data daily,’ says Marina Pavlovic Rivas, CEO and co-founder of Eli.

While hormone trackers become more sophisticated – and in some cases, relied upon as contraception – the lines can blur between trust in technology and human responsibility. For more, read our Opinion piece.

Based on research by Cloud security firm Trend Micro, 24% of IT leaders claim that by 2030, data access will be linked to biometrics or DNA data, making cybersecurity hacks virtually impossible.

Of those surveyed, 32% believe that technology will eventually automate cybersecurity, resulting in little need for human interaction. In addition, 15% of IT workers predict that by 2025 security will be self-managing and automated using artificial intelligence (AI).

Leaders at Trend Micro, however, believe that people will remain integral to the defence against cyberattacks. ‘While AI is a useful tool in helping us to defend against threats, its value can only be harnessed in combination with human expertise,’ explains Bharat Mistry, technical director at Trend Micro.

As we look to the future, biometric data will become more widely adopted to make personal data and digital systems impenetrable. Read our Corporeal Privacy for more case studies.