Trend Longevity Rating
became core infrastructure in health care, often bigger than the book imagined
How this trend held up
This is the trend the book most undersold. In 2013, "empathetic interfaces" meant a text-message program, a glowing pill cap, and a telepresence robot for readmission prevention. Eleven years later, generative AI chatbots — Woebot, Wysa, and general-purpose assistants like ChatGPT — are a default first stop for millions of people seeking health information and emotional support, and telehealth/remote-patient-monitoring platforms became standard of care after the 2020 pandemic forced adoption at a pace no 2013 forecast anticipated. The book's instinct — that health technology would only work if it felt human rather than clinical — turned out to be the single organizing idea of the next decade of digital health, realized through a technology (large language models) that didn't exist yet when the book was written.
Every past trend prediction is re-reviewed and graded with a Trend Longevity Rating, measuring how much each originally curated trend still matters years later.
