The future with technology: #2 Biopayments.

Imagine if we can receive (pay for) certain services by doing some exercise, donating blood, getting some tests done, or running a mile wearing a comfortable pair of shoes. Welcome to biopayments. Biopayments can be simply defined as payments made by performing some activity which is beneficial to both the parties. It has also started in some countries where you can get a train ticket by doing a couple of sit-ups. Interesting ways to keep the citizens healthy.

In Russia, 30 Squats Will Get You a Train Ticket

There can be multiple areas of implementation of biopayments. The idea should be to build an ecosystem around it and engage the public in doing simple stuff.

Biopayments have been in there for long in different forms. In India, they used to call “shrmdaan”. If a person could not repay back the loan they would have to work for the lender for the fixed amount of time. Sometimes this duration was a couple of generations. This is when this practice went out of way and lenders starting misusing it.

In a simple scenario for bio-payments- energy can be generated and used to pay for the service. So say for example if I want to buy a water bottle from the vending machine I could either pay for it in dollars or generate energy by cycling (a bicycle is attached to the vending machine) for x mins. The energy generated could have the same dollar value as of the water bottle. The generated energy can be used to run the vending machine. This is just one of the scenario. If we think hard we can find a lot of such scenarios and I believe we can implement them quite easily.

Other areas can be- re-cycling waste and produce energy against it. The user can get paid or buy a product based on the value of generated energy. There can be other areas of implementation where we can use biopayments. Sharing our medical history or getting some medical tests done for the purpose of research and science. For example- a science institute is looking to collect some sample data related to blood sugar levels. They can install a device on a train station or airport etc. that can collect data and user details. The user can buy a ticket in return for providing this data. The premise is pretty simple- people should get paid for every effort/energy they spent, however small it is. Payments can be sent to any wallet, it can pico payments or micropayments or whatever.

This is probably the smallest article I have written. I will be writing more on this.

The future with technology: #2 Biopayments. was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.