Transformative Technology Podcast: Recent Episodes
Nichol Bradford
Endel generates personalized adaptive environments, designed to make you focus faster, stay in the zone for longer periods of time and relax better. Endel - Personalized sounds to help you focus and relax. Our core algorithm is based on circadian rhythms, pentatonic scale and sound masking. The sounds adapt to different inputs – like time of day, weather, heart rate, and location. Endel is a Techstars Music’18 company. We are a small team of artists, developers and scientists building an ecosystem of applications for smart homes, public spaces, mobility industry and workplaces.
Jackie is currently a PhD student in positive organizational psychology at Claremont Graduate University. She works in systems-level well-being research, evaluation, and application. She utilizes evidence-based behavioral science and positive psychology towards optimal functioning and human flourishing at scale. She works with systems, such as municipal governments, the education sector, and the tourism industry. She holds a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s from the University of Southern California. Strengths: Creativity, critical thinking, perspective, curiosity, love of learning, individualization, input, achiever, and leadership. Specialities: Strategy, research, evaluation, analytics, curriculum development, design thinking, experience and service design, creative ideation, integration, facilitation, speaking, writing // project management, people management, business development, international business // branding, growth, integrated marketing, pr, content creation
My research focuses on using mobile sensing to study human relationships. I am particularly interested in relationships between romantic couples, e.g., can data sensed on mobile phones tell us something about the nature of a romantic relationship? How does a romantic relationship differ from a friendship based on mobile phone data? I am a lifelong learner, seeking opportunities to hone and broaden my skill set. In my spare time, I enjoy reading books, watching movies, and making some comics about my life . I also value physical activities. My current exercise activities are swimming and yoga.
Over the past decade, there has been a surge of new wellness technologies, catering from the individual to spas and hotels. Wearables, with sensors to monitor steps, heart rate, sleep and temperature grew significantly in popularity. Similarly, there has been a boom in technologies that aid sleep and a plethora of new pleasure technology. Within the past five years, many wellness technologies have increasingly become fashion forward from rings to necklaces capable of measuring your mood, heart rate and steps. As the cognitive technologies improve, the wellness technology market is now seeing its early first wave of wellness technologies that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI).
When the Pew Research Center asks American internet users for their bottom-line judgment about the role of digital technology in their own lives, the vast majority feel it is a good thing. Yet, over the past 18 months a drumbeat of concerns about the personal and societal impacts of technology has been growing – and it crescendoed last week in the congressional grilling of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his company’s power and impact on American life. More broadly the concerns are highlighted by headlines about the “Heavy Toll of ‘Always On’ Technology,” the emergence of a “techlash” driven by people’s disillusionment with the online environment, and worries over digital dystopia. There has also been commentary and research about the effects digital technology usage can have on people’s well-being, their level of stress, their likelihood of committing suicide, their ability to perform well at work and in social settings, their capability to focus in an era of information overload, their capacity to modulate their level of connectivity, and their overall happiness.