CES Unveiled’s preview of health tech at CES 2018

November 11, 2017 | by

CES Unveiled, Metropolitan Pavilion, NYC, Thursday 9 November

The Consumer Technology Association’s (CTA) press preview of the gargantuan CES 9-12 January 2018 Las Vegas event was the first of several international preview ‘road shows’. It’s a benchmark of the ebb and flow of health tech and related trends on the grand scale. Gone are the flashy wearables which would change colors based on our sweat patterns and heart rate, or track the health and movement of pets. Now it’s the Big Issues of 5G, AI, machine learning, AR/VR, and smart cities. Entertainment, especially sports, are now being reinvented by all of these.

The developments this Editor gleaned from the mountain of information CEA plies us keyboard tappers that are most relevant to healthcare are:

  • Wireless 5G. As this Editor has written previously from Ericsson and Qualcomm, 5G and 5G New Radio will enable amazingly fast mobile speeds and hard-to-believe fast connectivity by 2019. It will enable IoT, self-driving cars, cars that communicate with each other, reconstruction of industrial plants, electric distribution, multimodal transport, and perhaps the largest of all, smart cities. The automation of everything is the new mantra. Accenture estimates the impact will be 3 million new jobs (nothing about loss), annual GDP increased by $500bn, and drive a $275bn investment from telecom operators.
  • AI.  Society will be impacted by machine learning, neural networks and narrow (e.g. calorie counting, diagnostics) versus general AI (simulation of human intelligence). This affects voice-activated assistants like Echo, Alexa, and Google Home (now owned by 12 percent of the population, CES survey) as well as robotics to ‘read’ us better. These conversations with context may move to relationships with not only these assistants but home robots such as from Mayfield Robotics’ Kuri (which this Editor attempted to interact with on the show floor, to little effect and disappointment). Oddly not mentioned were uses of AI in ADL and vital signs tracking interpreted for predictive health.
  • Biometrics. This will affect security first in items like padlocks (the new Bio-Key Touchlock) using fingerprint recognition and smart wallets, then facial recognition usable in a wide variety of situations such as workplaces, buildings, and smartphones. Imagine their use in items like key safes, phones, home locks, and waypoints inside the home for activity monitoring.
  • AR and VR. Power presence now puts viewers in the middle of a story that is hard to distinguish from reality. The pricing for viewers is dropping to the $200-400 range with Oculus Go and Rift. At the Connected Health Conference, this Editor saw how VR experiences could ease anxiety and disconnectedness in older people with mobility difficulties or dementia (OneCaringTeam‘s Aloha VR) or pain reduction (Cedars-Sinai tests). The other is Glass for those hands-on workers [TTA 24 July] and heads-up displays in retail.

CES is also hosting the fourth Extreme Tech Challenge. Of the ten semi-finalists showing down on 11 January, three are in healthcare: Neurotrack to assess and improve memory; Tissue Analytics that uses smartphone cameras to assess wounds and healing; and (drum roll) the winner of TTA’s Insanely Cute Factor competition, the Owlet smart sock for baby monitoring [TTA’s backfile here]. One of the judges is Sir Richard Branson, who will host the finalists on 28 February on Necker Island (which hopefully will be rebuilt by that time).

After the nearly two-hour briefing, CEA hosted a mini-show on the ground floor of the Metropolitan. (more…)

Breathe, exhale: a future bracelet that may predict asthma attacks through breath

May 24, 2017 | by | 1 Comment
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/micronano201722-f1.jpg” thumb_width=”175″ /]A sensor developed by a research team from Rutgers University may in future lead to wearables that predict asthma attacks. The team developed a reduced graphene oxide sensor to detect telltale biomarkers–elevated nitrite levels in exhaled breath condensate (EBC)–that mark the increased airway inflammation present in a developing asthma attack. Currently, breath has to be condensed before being sampled by the nanoelectric sensor, but the team’s goal is “to develop a device that someone with asthma or another respiratory disease can wear around their neck or on their wrist and blow into it periodically to predict the onset of an asthma attack or other problems,” according to researcher Mehdi Javanmard. This concept is far more convenient than a bulky spirometer. Beyond warning the person of an asthma attack, the technology could also be used for other obstructive lung diseases and for tracking treatment/drug effectiveness. Hat tip to Toni Bunting of TASK Ltd. Futurity. Microsystems & Nanoengineering (journal, full text)

It is good to see credible academic R&D in this area of wearables, since there have been others claiming measurement of calories, blood glucose, and hydration, that have been, or been close to, scams. We suspected the Healbe GoBe couldn’t do what it claimed in calorie and BG measurement in 2014 [TTA 26 June 14 and 24 Feb 15] after raising $1 million (more…)

Healbe GoBe sees daylight–but still can’t count calories

February 24, 2015 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/healbe-gobe-top-4-970×0.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]At CEWeek NYC last June, this Editor spent some time with Healbe’s co-founder, who demonstrated to me a prototype of the Healbe GoBe 100% Automatic Body Manager fitness tracker. I walked away underwhelmed at its performance and skeptical of its main claim to fame–automatic measurement of caloric intake via measuring blood glucose conversion to fluid in cells. This was reinforced by a trail of tech product reviewers digging into its development, the controversial science behind it and a growing rebellion on Indiegogo, where contributions exceeded $1 million. Then it took delays–first September, then November. Few in the industry believed it would ever ship.

However, it has, and at least one intensive review after a month of wear is in from Engadget. Topline: it’s not a scam (which will disappoint some)  (more…)

Faux Glass: not just a knockoff, but a sendup

October 15, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/gI_147093_Faux-Glasses-Sample-Picture-Spotlight-On.png” thumb_width=”150″ /]Need to impress your Silicon Valley/Alley buds, but the exchequer is low? Didn’t get to be a Glass Explorer on the first round? Fret no more! Faux Glass is here. It’s missing a few things that Glass has–like a phone, photo/video camera, a GPS, internet search access smack in your eye–but does have a magnifier, a spotlight and eight LED indicator lights which light in sequence to a “crack me up” command, like Where the Faux (the product’s built in GPS to nowhere), Faux-to Shop (for fixing photos never taken), and What the Faux (for general searching). All on Indiegogo for $1,480 less than Glass! “They’re not fake anything; they’re real Faux” says Faux-In-Chief Robin Raskin (who’s also a tech journalist, author and founder of Living in Digital Times and FashionWare). The full court press on Faux Glass is of course leading up to International CES in January and their conferences including the Digital Health Summit. Ms Raskin through this also reminds us that crowdfunding and digital tech is not to be taken too seriously. PRWeb release. Website.

Of course there’s the possible faux that presents itself as seriously real, or what’s been dubbed ‘scampaigns’ on crowdfunding sites like…Indiegogo. (more…)

Is digital health neglecting The Big Preventable–medical errors?

September 6, 2014 | by | 1 Comment

 

Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the US – third only to heart disease and cancer – claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year.

(US Senate hearing, cited in HealthcareITNews 18 July 2014)

At the end of last month, this Editor questioned the efficacy of our current state of ‘consumer engagement’ in Patients should be less engaged, not more. The ‘less engaged’ was a call for simplification: regimens and devices which were easier to use, less complicated and far easier to fit in everyday life. (Aesthetics helps too.) Back in 2013, HeartSister/Ethical Nag (and Canadian) Carolyn Thomas called for health app (and by inference consumer engagement) designers to ‘skate to where the puck is going’–as in “For Pete’s sake, go find some Real Live Patients to talk (and listen) to first before you decide where you’re going!” Often it seems like these apps and platforms are designed in a vacuum of the entrepreneur’s making. The proof is the low uptake (Pew, Parks, IMS) and the apps’/programs’ lack of stickiness after all this time (Kvedar 8 Sep blog post).

Now Laurie Orlov tells us we were looking at the wrong puck, as analysts do. First, all that ‘nudging’ and all those apps haven’t moved the needle on diabetes and obesity. Second, why are app developers neglecting that third largest killer, preventable medical errors? Add to that 400,000 yearly–over 1,000 per day–the 10,000 estimated patients every day who suffer serious complications. (more…)

Ka-ching! Mid-year digital health funding hits $2.3 B: Rock Health

July 2, 2014 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/stick_figure_push_up_arrow_400_clr.png” thumb_width=”120″ /]It’s geometric! Rock Health’s total of $2.3 billion in digital health funding as of June 2014 just rocketed through the $1.97 billion 2013 full year total. Year over year to date, it’s up over 16 percent. And there’s stardust on every sub-sector: software, digital health, biotech and even medical device, the laggard (negative growth) in previous reports. Funding rounds must have taken vitamins, because they are 50 percent larger on average at $15 million versus last year’s $10 million. But there’s the same concentration on big deals like NantHealth, Flatiron Health, Alignment Healthcare and Proteus, heavily skewed towards payer administration, digital health devices, data analytics and healthcare consumer engagement. But the clouds on the horizon are there. Last year’s disproportion in seed/Series A accelerates, and the ‘down the line’ weakness continues with proportionally fewer companies reaching B, C and D rounds. Crowdfunding has also lost its luster–50 percent off with Indiegogo dominating–but its blowout with Healbe GoBe [TTA 26 June, CEWeek] accounted for 41 percent of total crowdfunding dollars; MedStartr stayed in the game at a distant second. IPOs haven’t been great, the ‘digital health index’ is an underperform yet funders are still itchy to cash out multi-round companies like Practice Fusion (EHR/billing), Proteus and ZocDoc via IPO. VentureBeat. Rock Health report on Slideshare.