A person viewed from above sits on a white tiled floor with a laptop on their lap. Beside them is a pair of glasses, a tablet, a phone, a notepad, some headphones and a cup of coffee. All white.

Happy New Hashtag! Words to watch in 2022

2022 is well underway and we’ve watched the world’s biggest tech companies (ourselves included!) share their visions at the annual future-fest that is the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But what are the big buzzwords you’ll seeing rolling through your social feeds in 2022? And, more importantly, what do they mean? We’ve picked five of the hashtags we think you’ll be seeing a lot of this year.

#AIOT

No, it’s not a typo, the Internet of Things has grown up and probably without even realising it we’ll be welcoming the Artificial Intelligence of Things into our homes and businesses. AIOT-powered products will do all the same things as your standard IOT connected device, but with one major and crucial difference – they can learn from the data they receive and adapt the way they respond accordingly. Probably the best example of AIOT can be found in fitness trackers and smart watches which gather information on your health every moment of every day through sensors, continually monitoring and learning how your body ‘performs’ and can then alert you to anomalies. But the example we like best is agricultural – imagine a robot that uses machine vision to monitor when crops are at risk of pests and then takes action to stop them? Cool huh?

#PrecisionMedicine

If you’ve watched our recent webinar on ‘The Golden Age of Precision Medicine’ , you’ll know exactly what a gamechanger this is for Life Sciences. Up until now, doctors have diagnosed and treated illnesses based on how they appear in the ‘average patient’. A ‘one treatment fits all’ approach, if you will. Through precision medicine, clinicians can use patient data – scans, genetic markers, blood tests – to understand the multitude of different ways that one condition can show itself across a population. And then adjust how they provide care, based on the patients, not the illness. Over the next few years this will mean huge changes for the way that healthcare operates. Highly effective early screening programmes, reduced levels of adverse reactions to medicines and vastly better clinical data for doctors are all benefits that will that ultimately improve patient care.

A woman sits on a couch in a comfortable living room that is lit with warm golden light. There are stylish scatter cushions around her and a white bookcase behind. She wears a VR headset and has a Canon camera on a tabletop tripod on the coffee table in front of her. There is also a smart phone and a plant on the table.
Canon USA debuted their immersive calling platform ‘Kokomo’ at this year’s CES. It lets you chat in VR as you – no cartoonish avatars.

#Sustainability

2022 will be the year that businesses must prove their sustainability mettle as the outcomes of COP26 begin to filter through and plentiful allegations of greenwashing in 2021 have forced a rethink of what a good corporate citizen looks like. Increased openness and transparency have been welcomed by consumers, who continue to vote for sustainability with their wallets, but it’s clear that 2022 is the time for businesses to reach out to people – specifically young people – as a means of understanding what the next generation expect from the brands they engage with. We view this as a two-way street and our Young People Programme not only opens a valuable dialogue with future leaders, but supports them in discovering new opportunities, life skills and the tools to amplify their views on the issues they care most about.

#DigitalTwin

Sounds sinister, doesn’t it? But you can be assured that there is no human cloning here. Digital Twins are a risk-free way to test drive scenarios in a simulated world. So, for example, a digital twin can let a surgeon safely practice a procedure on a sensor-enabled digital model. Or can be used in gauging human responses to driverless vehicleswithout putting them on the road. More commonly, digital twins are already deployed in warehousing and retail environments, as a means to safely calculate new efficiency measures without risk. In 2022, the digital twin model looks set to be adopted widely, with big businesses using them to make operational decisions, and more cities look to follow Singapore’s example of using digital twins as a planning tool to help traffic flow effectively and public services run more smoothly.

There’s absolutely no doubt that transporting yourself
in an immersive way to a shared online space will eventually
be as natural as Facetiming

And finally… the #Metaverse

No 2022 list would be complete without the inclusion of The Metaverse. At the time of writing, Microsoft has just announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, openly speaking of its “key role in the development of metaverse platforms”. But for the uninitiated, what is ‘The Metaverse’? Well… at present it’s a kind of arrangement of ideas that brings virtual worlds like those that Meta and Microsoft are working on, with its own digital economy that overlaps into that of the ‘real world’. But, like the internet, the Metaverse is vastly bigger than any one organisation and each individual facet of the Metaverse will form a part of an online world that combines fully immersive experiences with the kind of day-to-day online interactions that we already use.

VR and AR play an obvious part in the overall vision of the Metaverse that’s being presented to the world. And there’s absolutely no doubt that transporting yourself in an immersive way to a shared online space will eventually be as natural as Facetiming. We generated a lot of excitement at CES by debuting ‘Kokomo’, our immersive calling platform that ditches the kooky avatars and lets you chat in the VR space as yourself. It showed just how ‘real’ the Metaverse can potentially be. And ‘potential’ is the key word here because as Raja Koduri of Intel recently stated in a blog, “our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this vision” and that “the entire plumbing of the internet will need major upgrades” to make the Metaverse work. In the meantime, we can look forward to the hashtags flowing as fast and freely as the ideas.

Written by Sarah Vloothuis, External Communications Senior Manager EMEA