Once again I am headed to CES this year. Last year the DigitalHealth pavilion was overflowing with people, innovation, and wearables designed to influence us to a healthier life.
The show still features the big sections of technology for cars, televisions and 3-D printers but much of the show is being turned over to healthcare and the Digital Health pavilion. Like my friend and colleague Jane Sarasohn-Kahn I see the big move towards high-deductible consumer driven health plans (HDHP) beinge a key part of the major uptake in digital health devices and wearables. We already got a sneak peek into this post the holiday period with FitBit rising to the top of the Apple App store charts and coming in in the top 3 of Amazon’s list of holiday gifts.
So this years hot trends
Wearables and the Internet of Medical Things
With personal financial responsibility comes a much bigger focus on the costs of healthcare services and how to avoid them. To avoid expensive costs later in life requires focus on behavior now on as captured in this excellent graphic from Bridgitte Piniewski, MD:
Lifestyle is the biggest factor in improving health
Expect CES 2016 to feature much more Digital Health and especially focused on the Internet of (Medical) Things – the key to engagement is making the workflow frictionless. Its no use creating yet another app or solution that requires consumers to download, install, learn or use yet another option. The success in this space will be around integrated solutions.
Wearables will expand and include even more data and the recent announcement of Samsung of the expanded capability in their new health-focused chip
that will add body fat, skeletal muscle mass, heart rate and rhythm, skin temperature, and stress level to the biometric tracking capabilities.
Expect many more additional features to the wearables mobile platform with add on modules, some already on show like the Philips Ultrasound, others work in progress
3-D Printing
Reaching new levels of innovation. Simple ideas like creating 3-D models base don actual patient anatomy prior to taking on complex surgery, printing prosthetics that are customized to the individual but now increasingly merged with wearables and printing biosensing strips that can be used for in home diagnostic testing. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University printed strip with bio material including antibodies and nanoparticles that can detect bacteria and viruses
Thin, lightweight and flexible materials developed by researchers at Florida Atlantic University, Stanford University and Harvard University, integrate cellulose paper and flexible polyester films as new diagnostic tools to detect bioagents in whole blood, serum and peritoneal fluid. Credit: Florida Atlantic University
Artificial Intelligence
Take a look at Lunit that helps physicians make accurate diagnosis with machine learning that offers object detection (application of existing technology to the healthcare domain)
http://lunit.io/static/img/illust_proj1.png
There are others including IBM’s Watson for Healthcare and in our Dell’s portfolio announced at RSNA ZebraMed
Repurposing Existing Technology
In my review from CES 2015 there were plenty of drones (with some medical applications) and technology to aid flying and use. Many were showing image stabilization as captured in my video here:
and I captured this on a custom video gimball
We have so much opportunity to innovate in healthcare by repurposing existing technology for DigitalHealth. This image stabilization technology has been applied to the task of eating which for most of us is easy but for some eating is a challenge of hand stabilization due to tremors:
You can buy these from Giftware (which was acquired by Google).
Parkinson is one of the leading causes of these tremors (about 1 Million americans are living with Parkinson’s and an estimated 7-10 Million worldwide). Its a simple idea (not to diminish the brilliant application and innovation by the founders) and a testament to the bright minds that fill our world and will continue to find solutions to problems we face in healthcare.
Join me at CES16
We’ve come a long way from CES in 1967
So I invite you to follow along for #CES16 my twitter handle (@DrNic1), my Instagram (DrNic1) account for pictures and Vine (DrNick) for insights, posts, pictures and short video segments of innovation throughout the course of the show
If you are here come join me and my fellow panel participants:
Shai Gozani, M.D., Ph.D., CEO and President, NeuroMetrix, Inc.
Beth Bierman, Partner, Morgan Lewis & Bockius
Bakul Patel, Associate Director for Digital Health, FDA, Center for Devices
“Roadmap to FDA Approval: What You Need to Know”
3:30-4:30 PM Tuesday, January 5
Las Vegas Convention Center, North Hall, N259
The discussion will be moderated by Alfred Poor, Editor, Health Tech Insider
and on Thursday the DigitalHealth Summit that will be in the Venetian, Level 4, Lando 4304
Comments are closed.