Computers that "hear what matters" will help parents and doctors to better understand baby talk.

The ability to touch through our phone, computers that hear and smell, digital taste buds that help us eat smarter – these are some of the developments that will change our lives within the next five years, according to the seventh annual “5 in 5” list of innovations from IBM.

These innovations will underpin the era of cognitive systems, where a new generation of machines will be able to learn, adapt, sense and begin to experience the world as it really is. “Just as the human brain relies on interacting with the world using multiple senses, by bringing combinations of these breakthroughs together, cognitive systems will bring even greater value and insights, helping us solve some of the most complicated challenges,” said Mr Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and Vice President of Innovation.

IBM predicts that one such breakthrough in cognition will be in the sense of touch. In five years, industries such as retail will be transformed by consumers’ ability to “touch” a product through their mobile devices.

Utilising the vibration capabilities of the phone, every object will have a unique set of vibration patterns that represents the touch experience: short fast patterns, or longer and stronger strings of vibrations. The vibration pattern will differentiate silk from linen or cotton, helping simulate the physical sensation of actually touching the material.

Image recognition at the pixel level is the next innovation on the “5 in 5” list. “Computers today only understand pictures by the text we use to tag or title them; the majority of the information - the actual content of the image - is a mystery,” noted IBM. In the next five years, systems will not only be able to look at and recognise the contents of images and visual data, they will also be able to make sense of pixels in the way a human views and interprets a photograph.

According to IBM, this will have a profound impact for industries such as healthcare, retail and agriculture. For example, these capabilities can be put to work in healthcare by making sense out of massive volumes of medical information such as MRIs, CT scans, x-rays and ultrasound images to capture information tailored to particular anatomy or pathologies.

“What is critical in these images can be subtle or invisible to the human eye and requires careful measurement. By being trained to discriminate what to look for in images - such as differentiating healthy from diseased tissue - and correlating that with patient records and scientific literature, systems that can ‘see’ will help doctors detect medical problems with far greater speed and accuracy,” said IBM.

The third area of cognitive innovation will be in computers that “hear what matters”, and this could have applications ranging from danger detection to understanding baby talk. Raw sounds will be detected by sensors, much like the human brain. The system will also take into account other relevant data such as visual or tactile information, and classify and interpret the sounds based on what it has learned.

For example, a distributed system of clever sensors will detect elements of sound such as sound pressure, vibrations and sound waves at different frequencies. These can be interpreted to predict, for example, when trees will fall in a forest or when a landslide is imminent.

In another example, “baby talk” can be understood as a language in itself, using a sophisticated speech recognition system that correlates  sounds and babbles with other sensory or physiological information such as heart rate, pulse and temperature. This can convey to parents or doctors what baby sounds really mean – whether fussing indicates a baby is hungry, hot, tired or in pain.

The fourth area of innovation is in the sense of taste. IBM researchers are developing a computing system that actually experiences flavour, to be used with chefs to create tasty and novel recipes. The computer will be able to use algorithms to determine the precise chemical structure of food and why people like certain tastes. The information can then be used together with models of perception to predict the taste appeal of flavours. According to IBM, a system like this can be used to help people eat healthier by creating novel flavour combinations that make healthy foods more palatable.

IBM’s fifth prediction is that computers will have a sense of smell. During the next five years, tiny sensors embedded in the computer or cell phone will detect if the user is coming down with a cold or other illness by analysing odours, biomarkers and thousands of molecules in someone’s breath. This will also assist doctors in diagnosing and monitoring the onset of ailments such as liver and kidney disorders, asthma, diabetes and epilepsy by detecting which odours are normal and which are not.

The innovation is also beginning to be applied to tackle clinical hygiene. For example, antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are commonly found on the skin and can be easily transmitted wherever people are in close contact. One way of fighting MRSA exposure in healthcare institutions is by ensuring medical staff follow clinical hygiene guidelines. In the next five years, IBM technology will “smell” surfaces for disinfectants to determine whether rooms have been sanitised.

The “IBM 5 in 5” is based on market and societal trends as well as emerging technologies from R&D labs that can make these transformations possible.