DUBAI // A leading technology innovator is on a visit to the Arabian Gulf to introduce his concept of maximising human performance by linking senses to products.
Jim Newton, the market development director at McLaren Applied Technologies in the UK, has linked the company’s expertise to other industries, such as health care, well-being, sports, transport and energy.
“The approach is to be able to identify niche areas where performance of the human is critical to the eventual outcome and, preferably, where you can measure the effectiveness of the decisions in that outcome,” he said in Dubai on Thursday. “The work we do broadly falls into high performance design and performance management systems.”
That means creating objects of desire that people wish to engage with, and adapting them to human behaviour.
One example is McLaren’s work with Specialized, a company that builds high-performance bicycles in California.
“We’re helping them change how they think about the design of racing bikes,” said Mr Newton. “And, increasingly, we’re creating meta products, which are products of desire which also have intelligence built into their fabric, such as sensing.”
That intelligence allows the bicycle to react to the person’s riding style or the terrain and adapt itself or provide recommendations as to how the person can mould his techniques to the area he is in.
Another example is the Formula One race car.
“When you see the car going around the track, there are about 500 different sensors on that car,” he said. “We use those sensors and that data during the race to understand the condition of the car, the environment and the race, to help us make decisions about that race, for instance when to change the tires.”
His aim is to take that concept of remote condition understanding into other industries.
“If you understand the person, the environment and the context of the decision he has to make, you can help that person be in a better place to make that decision,” Mr Newton said. “That could mean in terms of energy levels of the person and the environment that you’re sitting in. We all make decisions every day but now you can start taking decisions as to when to take a break at work or is it better to take a walk away from the desk.”
McLaren has started working with GlaxoSmithKline, a global healthcare organisation, in understanding the symptoms that patients have in key disease areas, like strokes and arthritis.
“We use that knowledge to make the medicine development process more effective, to tailor medicines more specifically to individuals, increasingly, and, once in public hands, to understand how patients are using the medicines in conjunction with the rest of their life,” he said. “What we’ve been able to do in the F1 business is to start to make those links between what we can measure and the quality of the decisions that are being made. So we’re taking that understanding that we’ve gained in our own research and environment, applying that and commercialising with our partners into different industries.”
They have also started trials this week with a health insurer and a medical institution in the UK for patients in obesity to better understand how their behaviour affects their condition.
“What’s important is when you think about what makes us desirable as a brand,” said Tom Pryor, the regional marketing manager at McLaren Automotive. “For a McLaren car owner, to know that the car he’s driving has been developed by a business that is also developing solutions in health care and bicycles that are being ridden by world championship-winning cyclists, it makes him feel more and more that he’s driving something at the cutting edge of innovation.”
Mr Newton visited the UAE to study the market and, potentially, have a centre of innovation based here, adding to offices in Singapore and the US. He is in Bahrain on Saturday to participate in the Great Advanced Engineering Seminar.
cmalek@thenational.ae
