For over ten years, virtual fitness era has been a fast-growing space at the yearly CES, the biggest conference protecting client electronics on the earth.
When the meet-up convenes over 100,000 tech-folk in Las Vegas at first of 2023, we’ll see much more fitness and self-care equipment and products and services at #CES23 — at the side of new-new issues displayed in aisles neatly outdoor of the bodily house at the Las Vegas Conference Heart map classified “virtual fitness” at this 12 months’s CES within the North Corridor.
Some context: my corporate has been a member of the Shopper Era Affiliation for a few years, and I’ve attended CES greater than a dozen instances. Gary’s Ebook Membership featured my HealthConsuming: From Well being Shopper to Well being Citizen on the 2020 CES. [FYI, “Gary” is Gary Shapiro….
Every year, CES features the “Best Of Innovations” in the many categories of products featured at the meeting, and this year’s 2023 digital health honorees span a wide range of applications including heart health, hearing, oral care, sleep, diabetes management, neurology, and other areas of health and medicine.
As my advisory work with companies across the health/care ecosystem has increasingly shifted to omni-channel, home-based and retail sites, CES has emerged an important touch point for me every year to receive updates and check-in with key innovators that increasingly serve up tools underpinned with clinical evidence and enchanting design.
That’s what I’m looking for at #CES23.
One way to deal with the scale and sheer physical experience of CES is to have a context for filtering the thousands of offerings, a sort of sensual overload. For me in 2023, that construct is the home as the hub or “`HealthQuarters” for Everyday People — not only athletes or digitally native (younger) consumers.
So we can think about the home’s “HealthQuarters” by “room,” such as the bedroom (for sleep and healthy sex-lives), the bathroom (for weight and mood observed in the mirror, or the toilet as a collector of health data), the kitchen (for healthy food and cooking), and the overall home environment itself for air and water quality.
For wonkier health care folks, you can consider these the “home determinants of health,” a subset of the big umbrella of social determinants or drivers of health.
Start in the bedroom, with a heavy dose of sleep — a growing category at CES for several years. Over the past ten years, as a sleep-fan, I’ve tried out various beds, smartrings and sensors for the bed. At CES 2023, sleep is a major segment. Somalytics will feature a sleep mask to monitor REM and track eye movements. This technology and expertise has only been available in sleep centers, and now Somalytics is moving this capability to consumers at home.
Ergosportive, part of the Ergo-motion company, will show its bed designed for sleep and recovery targeted to athletes and fitness-oriented consumers. Its app, which also connects with Garmin devices, tracks sleep, health and recovery data which can be shared with coaches. Think about this product beyond elite athletes, for our kids’ healthy sport involvement and people participating in sports throughout the year.
Heart health has become mainstream in digital health at CES, with wrist-tracking bands embedded various aspects of heart tracking, ear buds growing heart monitoring capabilities, and FDA-cleared blood pressure readings from the wrist from OMRON and Withings.
I have lauded OMRON’s “Going for Zero” long-term company vision to reduce strokes and heart attacks to “zero.” OMRON’s HeartGuide earned FDA clearance for its blood pressure monitor worn on the consumer’s wrist, featured here in Health Populi in 2018. At CES 2023, OMRON will announce the company’s expanding efforts for remote heart-health monitoring (RHM) and clinical evidence generated through its launch of RHM.
Withings expanded remote patient monitoring earlier in 2022, and began to collaborate on clinical trial data connections between consumers and researchers. We can expect Withings to expand more of that clinical connectivity to people self-caring at home — details under embargo until January 3 — but suffice it to say they comport with my HealthQuarters concept for more evidence-based care at-home.
Beyond the wrist, the ear has been getting more attention for digital health physical “real estate,” including hearing and heart applications among others. Some big retail health news in 2022 was the FDA’s finally enabling hearing aids to be sold direct-to-consumer — more on that important development here.
At CES 2023, we’ll see more hearing tech innovations like the CES honoree in the wearable tech category, Oticon. The company is offering a hearing device integrating deep neural network technology that offers “BrainHearing through the ear” in a customized hearing aid.
You might not think about pharmaceutical companies showing off technology at the “Consumer” Electronics Show, but the pharma industry has had a growing presence at CES for the past few years. Last year, Abbott made a big splash with the company’s Board Chairman/CEO delivering a keynote addressing connected care. This year, Abbott will once again be quite present at the conference, receiving three 2023 CES honors for innovations for a pacemaker, pain alleviating technology, and a monkey pox PCR test. Abbott will be joined by pharma and life science peers Merck, talking about the human brain and data collaboration across industries; and, SK Biopharmaceuticals which developed glasses that can detect or predict seizures based on the wearer’s brain, body and heart functions, among others demonstrating that prescription drugs and digital therapeutics have joined the consumer’s personal health ecosystems at home and in the community.
Among many other developments, I’ll be digging into…
- The huge opportunity for leveraging digital twin technology in health and life science research, and this year Dassault Systems will detail the company’s offering for “virtual twins” in and beyond health/care applications.
- The challenge of healthy aging, led by AARP, a long-time participant in the annual CES conventions and this year launching the AgeTech Summit. Ad part of this effort, MITRE’s Engenuity program will be firmly focused on health equity, access, security, and quality of life for all health citizens — especially older people.
- Explorations into emergency medicine and health care futures will be led by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), part of the Digital Health Studio at CES 2023.
In the explicitly non-digital health nor wearable tech areas of CES 2023, I’ll be exploring many aspects of our HealthQuarters beyond medical things — especially healthy eating and cooking (“the kitchen as health maker”) and clean environments for living well — namely clean air and clean water. In addition, the growing Internet of Things for healthy living grows annually at CES, and this year IoT will continue to grow mainstream muscles through voice technology, and home sensors for safety and security.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: As Kinsey Fabrizio, Senior VP at CTA, told U.S. News & World Report in a December 15th interview discussing the exhibitors, “They’re going to be showcasing some of the[se] answers that had been crucial right through the pandemic, and numerous the answers that experience persevered to modify the best way shoppers reside and behave.” Underpinning that habits has been shoppers’ non-public virtual transformations in the course of the pandemic, a type of silver linings we will be able to glance to as a favorable end result for many of us now empowered via client era for lots of life-flows.
Certainly, the COVID-19 public fitness disaster speeded up shoppers’ embody of virtual equipment for dwelling, running, cooking, buying groceries, praying, enjoying, studying from, and exercising at house.
We’ll see firms like Samsung more and more connecting era for just right and wholesome dwelling during our “HealthQuarters,” even if now not labelled as-such. Automobiles, too, will proceed to construct out protected and wholesome capability for mobility wellness and connectivity again to the house and particular person, as we’ve noticed detailed at earlier CES meet-ups.
Keep tuned for my ongoing protection of all-things-health right through the primary week of January 2023 by way of the Well being Populi weblog, my Twitter maintain @HealthyThinker, and my LinkedIn channel at Jane Sarasohn-Kahn.
Within the period in-between…welcome in your new HealthQuarters!
