Deepinder Goyal, founder of food delivery and quick commerce platform Zomato, has said that Temple — the company's upcoming wearable device — could eventually move well beyond consumer health tracking into high-stakes domains such as aviation and defence, where real-time physiological data may determine whether an individual is fit for a critical task.

What Goyal Said on X

Responding to user queries on social media platform X, Goyal outlined specific military and aviation use cases for the device. The exchange began when a user suggested Temple might help restaurant managers and chefs track stress levels during busy work shifts.

'I would certainly have it on pilots to check if they are fit to fly. And on the air force to check who is the fittest to fly a mission today,' Goyal wrote, signalling ambitions far beyond the wearable's current healthcare-focused positioning.

His remarks point to a future in which Temple's continuous physiological sensing could feed into pre-mission readiness assessments — helping commanders or aviation authorities make data-backed decisions rather than relying solely on self-reporting.

The BrainFlow Technology Behind the Claims

Central to Temple's pitch is a feature called BrainFlow, designed to continuously monitor changes associated with blood flow to the brain. Goyal said the device recently completed its second validation study involving 60 participants who were subjected to three distinct physiological challenges.

According to the study's findings, BrainFlow demonstrated correlations ranging from 0.84 to 0.91 with brain blood-volume changes measured using time-domain near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) — a technology capable of distinguishing changes in blood volume between the brain and the scalp. The figures, if independently verified, would suggest a meaningful degree of accuracy for a consumer wearable attempting to approximate clinical neurovascular monitoring.

Thoughts-to-Text Research Underway

Goyal also revealed that Zomato's research team is exploring a far more futuristic capability: translating human thoughts directly into text. When asked whether Temple could one day sense a user's intentions and trigger automatic actions on a smartphone, he confirmed work is already in progress.

'We have a research team working on thoughts to text, but that looks like a few years away. Maybe the third or fourth version of Temple,' he said.

This places the thoughts-to-text feature well beyond Temple's initial launch roadmap, situating it as a long-range research ambition rather than a near-term product promise.

Context and What It Means

The comments come as wearable technology increasingly attracts interest from both defence establishments and aviation regulators globally, who are examining biometric monitoring as a supplement to traditional fitness-for-duty checks. Notably, this is also Zomato's most significant foray into hardware, a territory far removed from its core food-delivery business — and a bet that physiological data at scale could open entirely new revenue streams.

Temple's pathway to defence or aviation adoption, however, would require regulatory clearance, clinical validation beyond internal studies, and likely partnerships with institutional buyers — steps Goyal has not yet detailed publicly.

How quickly Temple can move from consumer health gadget to mission-critical tool will depend as much on regulatory acceptance as on the technology itself.