International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is just around the corner. My inbox has been innundated with emails from PR people interested in showing me the latest and great mobile health technologies at the show. I haven’t seen the final numbers on growth of the health portion yet, but I can assure you it’s going to be bigger than it’s ever been before.
The biggest trend I think we’re going to see this year is we’re going to see a lot of health applications outside of the Digital Health Summit section of the conference. A lot of the device makers are integrating some sort of health application into their devices and so I’ll just as easily be able to go up to the Samsung booth and talk mobile health as I will be able to do in the health specific section of the conference. I think that’s a sign of where mobile health applications are heading. They’re quickly just becoming a part of the overall ecosystem.
With that said, I’m going to be watching 2 main areas of applications:
Wearables – This is the obvious one. I won’t be able to turn my head at the health section of CES without being inundated with some sort of wearable. CES is known for having too many iPhone case companies exhibiting. You literally start to tune them out because there are so many. I wonder if I’ll start to do the same with wearables. Luckily, most wearables have more points of differentiation than iPhone cases. Or do they? I’m certain I’m going to find out.
Robotics and Telemedicine – This is something that’s been popular the past year or two at CES. I expect it will be even more popular this year. The mixture of robotics with Telemedicine is powerful in healthcare and also with caregivers. I’ll be interested to see if these have really made any progress or if they’re just pedaling more or less that same offerings as previous years.
Those are a few things I’ll be watching for at CES next week. if you’ll be at the event, I’d love to see you there.
