The Expanding World of Health Sensors

It’s been fascinating to watch the number of health sensors blow up over the years. The sad part of the last 3-5 years has been that a huge majority of the sensors that were hitting the market were essentially me too products. How many fitness trackers, blood pressure cuffs, smart scales, heart rate monitors, etc do we need. No doubt each of these products has produced some successful businesses, but have they really moved the needle on healthcare? My answer is no and that’s because these health sensors aren’t very clinically relevant.

The good thing is that I’ve started to see a wider variety of sensors that measure everything imaginable on your body. None of these have been breakout hits yet, but that’s largely because they’re trying to really measure something that’s clinically relevant versus creating a consumer toy.

There are a lot of ways to look at the health sensor market, but one way is to look at which part of the body they’re using to measure some health indicator. Here’s a list of some of the sensors I’ve seen over the past couple years (starting with the obvious ones):

  • Skin
  • Motion
  • Sweat
  • Blood
  • Eye
  • Visual
  • Brainwaves
  • Stool
  • Blood Flow
  • Spit

As you can see, there are companies working on measuring every output we produce in order to try and understand our health.  Some of these we’ve been doing forever like blood tests.  Labs are such an important part of healthcare.  However, what’s different about the latest generation of health sensors is that most of these health sensors are going direct to consumers as opposed to selling to the healthcare providers.

Think about that shift. That’s a massive change. Plus, the ironic part is that many healthcare providers are adopting and using consumer sensors in their healthcare organizations. I’m also interested in how this shift in information is going to change the balance of power in healthcare. Information is power.

Are there other sensors out there that you see coming to market? Which ones do you think will be most clinically relevant?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • John, I think you are on track. Next month Sensogram Technologies Inc delivers the first integrated multi-variant vital signs monitor. SensoSCAN simultaneously and continuously measures Blood Pressure, Blood Oxygen Saturation %, Pulse Rate and Respiration Rate. First targets because of Pre FDA status is directed towards self management of the process. Clinical accuracy is present.

    If people have the ability to archive their contextualized data harvest and analyze it, the data ownership advantage may tip. But now the potential for producing a very large data set the archival and analysis will drive the use of it.

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories