I usually don’t comment on the acquisitions broadly, because they offer little additional context. However, this snippet caught my attention:
Amazon’s iRobot Deal Is Really About Roomba Mapping Your Home – Bloomberg
Amazon’s 2017 deal for Whole Foods gave it insights into the grocery industry. The $3.5 billion deal announced for One Medical Ltd. last month provides a wealth of health-care data. Now iRobot can give Jeff Bezos & Co. a sense of what’s in your home.
Purchase habits and financial “buckets” are invaluable additions to target individuals. Roomba alone has invaluable information about home mapping. All the cat gifs with Roomba appear in paid promotions to “humanise” the “robotic technology” and in turn AI being welcome in your bedrooms. All devices capture ambient noise (and sounds) and have developed sophisticated algorithms to understand voice contexts (and “sentiment analysis”) by mapping individual accounts. If you pair this with financial clustering (i.e. neighbourhoods), Amazon can identify disease clusters in real time. All this happening in real-time through privacy creep and without spending a dollar in building hospitals. I believe this might be the real push towards the healthcare (wellness) and represents the disruptions. Home care will also “benefit” from “subscription” models.
Do we need big-tech to step into this? They are slowly replacing the government model of healthcare (and social spending), mostly through ineffectual legislation and bipartisanship policies.
RadOncNotes 