For over ten years, digital health technology has been a fast-growing area at the annual CES, the largest convention covering consumer electronics in the world.

 

 

 

 

 

When the meet-up convenes over 100,000 tech-folk in Las Vegas at the start of 2023, we’ll see even more health and self-care tools and services at #CES23 — along with new-new things displayed in aisles well outside of the physical space on the Las Vegas Convention Center map labeled “digital health” at this year’s CES in the North Hall.

 

 

 

 

Some context: my company has been a member of the Consumer Technology Association for many years, and I have attended CES more than a dozen times. Gary’s Book Club featured my HealthConsuming: From Health Consumer to Health Citizen at 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] solutions that were critical during the pandemic, and a lot of the solutions that have continued to change the way consumers live and behave.” Underpinning that behavior has been consumers’ personal digital transformations through the pandemic, one of those silver linings we can look to as a positive outcome for many people now empowered through consumer technology for many life-flows.

Indeed, the COVID-19 public health crisis accelerated consumers’ embrace of digital tools for living, working, cooking, shopping, praying, playing, learning from, and exercising at home.

We’ll see companies like Samsung increasingly connecting technology for good and healthy living throughout our “HealthQuarters,” even when not labelled as-such. Autos, too, will continue to build out safe and healthy functionality for mobility wellness and connectivity back to the home and person, as we’ve seen detailed at previous CES meet-ups.

Stay tuned for my ongoing coverage of all-things-health during the first week of January 2023 via the Health Populi blog, my Twitter handle @HealthyThinker, and my LinkedIn channel at Jane Sarasohn-Kahn.

In the meantime…welcome to your new HealthQuarters!