What will the embedded market look like 15 or 20 years from now? If I could see that far into the future, I would make a killing on Wall Street! The reality is, most long-term predictions have a remarkably short shelf life, especially in a market where disruptive technologies are the norm, not the exception.

That said, can we still predict what the next few years will bring? Definitely. But to make a successful forecast, we can't simply evaluate current technology trends. We must also consider how shifts in demographics, social values, and the economy will create new opportunities and challenges.

Take the environment, for example. Growing concern about the health of our planet and the sustainability of our natural resources will determine not only the kinds of systems we build, but how we build them. Some of QNX's most successful customers have already picked up on this trend, much to their benefit.

For example, one builds wind turbines that generate thousands of megawatts of electricity worldwide. Another develops building automation systems that can slash power consumption by 20% to 50%. These companies help to reduce the huge amount of coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear fuel consumed every year, but just as important, their success demonstrates that building "green" technology can also build significant revenue.

The next big trend is longevity. People in developed countries are living longer, and the longer they live, the more medical care--and medical technology--they require. According to the Databeans market research firm, the worldwide market for medical electronics will grow from an estimated value of $116.7 billion in 2008 to about $191 billion in 2013.

This trend hasn't gone unnoticed. Intel, for example, recently received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a system that helps provide personalized home care, and Freescale is designing the world's first electrocardiogram (ECG) device on a chip. When you see large silicon vendors invest in a market, you know it's a space to watch.

The fastest growing segment of medical devices, according the FDA, is for home healthcare. This segment represents a wealth of opportunities for embedded systems developers, but it also raises a few challenges, particularly when it comes to usability: When you place a medical device into the hands of patients, rather than trained professionals, you had better make sure it has a simple, foolproof human-machine interface (HMI).

In fact, I predict that the HMI will become a differentiating technology not only in the medical market, but in other embedded segments as well. And that, in large part, is due to the iPhone.

The iPhone has little or nothing to do with medical instruments, industrial control systems, or automotive infotainment systems. Yet it will raise expectations about HMI design across these and other markets.

Simply speaking, customers won't tolerate a mediocre HMI--whether they are consumers buying the latest tech toy or companies purchasing a complex SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system.

Speaking of complexity, some pundits state that the amount of software in embedded systems is doubling in size every 10 to 24 months. Consider the automobile, for example. Consumers now want car radios that can play content from multiple devices--iPods, USB flash drives, PlaysForSure media players, Bluetooth phones, and so on--any of which may contain thousands of music files.

So, to begin, the radio needs middleware that can intelligently connect to multiple media sources and efficiently synchronize a mountain of content. The radio also needs voice recognition software, since using buttons or touchscreens to generate playlists can, in some situations, create driver distraction.

And to ensure it can actually hear what the driver is saying, the radio might also employ noise suppression software to filter out sounds generated by wind, rain, tires, HVAC systems, rumble strips, and passing cement trucks.

This growing complexity has huge ramifications for both vendors and developers. Twenty years ago, developers needed a vendor who could provide a good real-time operating system (RTOS) and compiler. Today, developers need a far larger foundation of tools, protocol stacks, and middleware just to get started.

Thus, RTOS vendors will have to focus higher and higher up the stack. They'll also have to provide technologies, such as partitioning schedulers, that make it easier to integrate massive amounts of software from geographically distributed development teams and suppliers.

Writing parallel software for multicore processors represents another major challenge. And again, RTOS and tools vendors will have a major role to play, be it through tools that analyze multicore behavior or operating-system technology that can efficiently schedule parallelized code across multiple cores.

Are there challenges on the road ahead? No question. Fortunately, though, embedded system developers are by nature problem solvers: devising elegant solutions to complex problems is what they do best. So am I excited about the future, both short and long term? Absolutely!

Dan Dodge is the CEO of QNX Software Systems.