CES roundup: what happened to the excitement around ‘innovation’, robots, VR, and voice assistants?

January 10, 2020 | by

What’s missing? Some sense of excitement. It may be your Editor’s back-to-work deluge after the holiday, but it’s hard not to have a sense of Déjà Vu All Over Again when reading the reporting from CES Las Vegas. So much of it seems lukewarm, a variant of what felt exciting, new, and transformative Back When. And so little of it seems to break through to a wider market. Let’s pick through and see what a Gimlet Eye might.

AARP’s Innovation Labs had yet another showcase of technologies from largely small companies from its own Hatchery and other accelerators with which it works. This year it highlighted VR developer partnerships with Rendever, which creates experiences for LTC residents, and VRHealth’s physical therapy at home. SanaHealth has a pulsed light/sound pain reduction device and the VoiceItt speech recognition device which translates the speech of the severely impaired into intelligible language.

Robots continue to seek a market, albeit tinier and we confess, occasionally more amusing.

  • Samsung’s Ballie robot, about the size of an orange, will roll through your home minding your pets, monitoring your safety, and interfacing with your smart devices and apps to make absolutely sure you get enough exercise and track your fitness. That is, if you don’t step on it, mistake it for a tennis ball, or your dog doesn’t mistake it for a chew toy.
  • The Charmin Rollbot will deliver a pre-loaded roll when you most need it, navigating through your home, although no capability of climbing stairs in its current concept.
  • The Misty II robot is yet again one of those tabletop robots which are developer toys. This one propels itself and has a camera, a microphone and 3D sensors, and could be repurposed for fall detection, companionship, or to bring you a hot towel.
  • The Lovot is a Japanese robot at its second CES which moves around, responds, is red and quite cuddly-looking (except for that weird thing on the top of its head). This ‘happiness robot’ will set you back over ¥299,000 ($2,700) when it finally hits the market.

Babies need both monitoring and changing, and combining the two may actually happen. P&G’s Pampers and Verily Life Sciences brought to CES the Lumi smart diaper with a connected HD video monitor plus an activity sensor in the diaper. It will detect baby’s sleep, feeding and diapering patterns. (But no changing by the Charmin Rollbot)

Voice assistants are getting more ubiquitous to find a way into the home. The war between Amazon Alexa (and siblings) and Google Assistant continues with new applications in cars (a/k/a computers on four wheels) to appliances and a host of third-party devices like garage door openers. A lot of this is ‘sneaky tech’ to get past the hard core of people who have already realized that both always-on Alexa and Assistant collect a lot of behavioral data which one does not necessarily want collected, and that many of these connected devices like Nest have been hijacked through compromised passwords.

More in Fierce Healthcare 7 Jan, 9 Jan; Mobihealthnews

Tech that assists those with speech impairments, telemedicine for mapping public health

June 8, 2017 | by

This year’s trend to develop technologies that solve specific but important problems, such as improving navigation for the visually impaired, [TTA 8 June] continues:

  • Voice-controlled assistance systems are becoming commonplace, from improved interactive voice response (IVR) to Siri, Echo, and Alexa. Their limitation is that their recognition systems understand only standard, not impaired or even heavily accented speech. For those with the latter, a Tel Aviv-based startup called Voiceitt has developed Talkitt, an app that learns an individual’s speech based on basic, everyday spoken (or typed input) phrases and after a training period, converts them into normal audio speech or text messages on a tablet or smartphone. This aids with everyday life as well as devices like Echo and Alexa. Voiceitt is out of the Dreamit Health accelerator and was just seed funded with $2 million. This Editor notes from the TechCrunch article that it’s described as ‘the thin edge of the wedge’ and ‘a market with need’. It will be introduced this year to health systems and schools to assist those with speech impairments due to health conditions. Hat tip to Editor Emeritus Steve Hards
  • Diagnosing degenerative diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, which is preventable but if untreated eventually blinds the patient, is doubly difficult when the patient is in a rural, economically disadvantaged, predominantly minority, and medically underserved area of the US. Ophthalmologist Seema Garg has been on a quest since 2009 to have this recognized as a public health threat. The North Carolina Diabetic Retinopathy Telemedicine Network out of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, headed by Dr. Garg, collaborated with five NC clinics to recruit patients with diabetes. Her team then trained primary care staff to take digital retinal photographs transmitted over a secure network to be examined for symptoms. The public health study used Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-mapping for patient accessibility to ophthalmologists, demographics, and risk factors such as higher A1C levels, minority race, older age, kidney disease, and stroke. JAMA Ophthalmology, Futurity  Hat tip to Toni Bunting of TASK Ltd. (and former TTA Ireland editor)