The way businesses crunch human data has changed MASSIVELY – here's how

How cognitive capabilities are revolutionising the way we process and understand human data

This is an excerpt from our e-guide, COGNITIVE BUSINESS – How cognitive solutions are enhancing the way we live & work, produced in partnership with IBM

It’s not so much the amount of data it can process that makes it useful in personal applications; it’s the type of data.

Human activity is difficult to boil down into binary data. We can’t easily be distilled into numbers and statistics, charts and graphs. The majority of the digital information collected by our mobile devices, IoT connected homewares and wearable tech isn’t numerical. It is data that, before cognitive, was essentially invisible, comprising of natural language, sight and sound.

Over 50 APIs – including language, vision and speech APIs – allow programs to recognise this information and transform it into useful data. Thanks to Watson’s cognitive capabilities, these APIs are learning all the time, with each transaction informing the way that the systems react in future. It’s this type of data that makes Watson so unique when embedded into applications that help us in our day-to-day lives, as it unravels our complicated interactions and transforms that data into usable information.

Take Under Armour Inc, a sportswear company who have incorporated Watson’s cognitive solutions to create fitness wearable that learns and evolves with its user. UA Record is a mobile device app, created by Under Armour as part of their Health Box connected fitness system. It is, essentially, a personal health consultant, a fitness trainer and a sports assistant, all rolled into one.

Linked to Under Armour’s wearable, UA Record can provide athletes – or those of you who are taking your new year’s fitness resolution particularly seriously – with personalised coaching.Connected to the wearable device, the app does what you’d expect from a mobile fitness wearable – tracking steps, monitoring heartrate, measuring athletic performance.

Yet UA Record goes a few steps further. Thanks to these learning capabilities and those language, vision and speech APIs, UA Record can tap into behavioural trends. It connects with a database of millions of individuals to compare your achievements to others ‘like you’. It can recognise – by sight – food images, to gauge nutritional intake. Its whether domain knowledge and news integration can help the device to tailor your exercise program every day to fit in with the world around you.

The more you use it, the more the app learns about you.