If you look back at the development of IT, there have been two major eras. First, we started out with a computer-centric view of the world, where the computer was a very expensive item used in data-processing centres, and where people had to adjust their activities just to use it.

We have since moved to network-centric computing, where the computer has become much more prevalent, connected and used by a large spread of people. But that is still basically a digital world; and, of course, human beings live in the real, analogue world.

So we now foresee another paradigm shift in IT - to human-centric computing. We are looking towards a society where IT becomes much more closely tied to human activity, where we put humans at the centre of the whole system, and where we look at everything from a human's point of view.

The idea is that new devices - communications devices, systems in cars, appliances and numerous others - will also be sensing tools, sensing the environment, sensing your health, sensing location and movement, and so on. Using those ubiquitous sensors, we can transform real-world information into real-time intelligence, and offer services that respond to people's real situations.

By drawing together large volumes of data from multiple sensors and using the vast resources that will be available in the cloud to analyse, structure and visualise it, we can feed knowledge back to provide a whole range of new services, new products and new solutions.

Captured experience

One interesting application area might be agriculture. In Japan, for example, only 40% of our food is produced locally; at the same time, the age of the average farmer is now 65. We think that human-centric computing can be applied to agriculture to make it much simpler, much more efficient and more appealing to a younger generation.

By placing sensors around farms, we can capture profiles of activity and analyse how experienced farmers manage their fields and livestock. We can use numerous other sensors to monitor the health of the environment: the soil, plant growth, the weather. This can all be gathered, analysed and used to create a knowledge base that is transferable to new people coming into the industry and to existing farmers to enhance their work.

The application of human-centric computing will be very broad: in traffic control, where the movements of cars and people will be tracked to provide a much safer, more efficient transportation environment; in "life- sensing", where monitors will be used to track metrics about blood pressure, heart rate and so on; and in numerous other areas such as power management and the home office.

In essence, what we want to do is look more deeply into the analogue world and, by connecting with our surroundings, create a human-centric, networked society.

As president of Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd, Dr Kazuo Murano leads an R&D organisation with a budget of ¥35 billion (€267.4m) that delivers technology innovation and product differentiation to its parent company, Fujitsu Ltd.