International CES 2015 – overwhelming at every turn. What a relief -- it's over. International CES was an extremely difficult venue to sort into useful categories – the Sands Exhibition Hall (part of Tech West) was filled with every health-related variant of wearable, fitness, and lifestyle improvement like Belty that expands as you eat more – as well as Eureka Park. Watch those fit women peddling bikes and running on treadmills, that distance-measured basketball jump shot, and of course -- the pet-related tracker with the large and tippy stuffed dog. And they don’t call it International for nothing – walking by, saw (or heard) French entrepreneurs (22% of all startups at CES), the Israeli pavilion, Italian, Spanish, German, and of course, Chinese and Japanese. It is an overwhelming show, not for the faint of heart or foot, and that’s just to get from hotels to conferences and exhibits.
The Wall Street Journal thinks that tech will change your life. Perhaps it will even rock your 2015. Rocking their 2015 is just the kind of experience that WSJ readers -- average age of 57 -- really want. But the Journal, ever hopeful for pushing down the subscriber age into the ad world's desirable 20’s and 30’s, hopes that the readers will be as excited as their current breathless tech columnists Fowler and Stern. So they want its boomer audience to grasp How to Get Ready. But of course! Starting with Windows 10 – which will have a resurrected Start menu and yes, it will improve multi-tasking – by the fall of 2015. Now aren't you excited?
PERS devices and wearables – what will bring them together?Now that the Washington Post has declared that Apple and Google will solve our health problems, aren’t you relieved? Oh, you’re a bit concerned about your privacy, the fact that all of your outside-of-Facebook web searches are by default accessible to Facebook – that you have to opt out on a completely separate website in order to terminate tracking of this activity? As you wander around Google, Yahoo or through iTunes, your searches about health topics, those are all now relevant for advertisers as provided by Facebook! And extra-special, what do you think about the fact that Apple lobbied away any need for FDA approval for anything health-related? Feeling safely healthy now?
International CES expects 150,000 people this year and 3500 exhibits. I will be going -- my feet are tired in anticipation. The show organizer, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), represents the $208 billion U.S. consumer electronics industry. Almost every commercial tech company will be there -- why even Apple is represented by Hyundai and other partners. In fact, Apple’s iWatch threatens to overwhelm the show with its non-presence. Or maybe it won’t be the missing watch, but the yet-to-arrive HomeKit which will dominate the show. I dunno about that, seems like the show is still dominated by cars. And will those giant TVs be supplanted by drones, wearables, and virtual reality? Or maybe the new generation of smart homes? Appliance and home improvement big businesses still believe in someone, somewhere having an as-yet-unmet desire for a smarter home. That’s been going on for a while, always hedged as the 'smart home for the future' because most homes are still pretty dopey. Perhaps the pipe dream of a smart home has never resonated with home owners – "connecting a bunch of devices that are primed for breaking."
The mHealth Summit held last week was an ever-more HealthIT (along with Digital Health and mHealth brethren) and the mobile/app aware, digital vision for the future, an extravaganza of technology advancement -- sounding vaguely familiar. Hey, there’s the renamed Patient Centered Medical Home, at this conference, called the Intelligent Medical Home). There were all of those Games for Health, behavior change, patient engagement, care coordination, and quite a few pharma-sponsored sessions. As is typical of an event like this, a plethora of investment-related, venture fund and startup-type sessions could be found.
Did you know that nearly 40% of seniors report having a disability? In the category of number obsession, this new snapshot of a government report caught my eye and should catch yours – it is referencing 16 million people. The report notes six types of disability reported in census data: hearing, sight, thinking and memory, walking, self-care and independent living. From the MedlinePlus release: "People older than 85 accounted for more than 25 percent of all disabilities among seniors, although they represented only 14 percent of the overall senior population."
So you want to launch a boomer/senior, home health tech product or service. As your new company gets ready to travel into battle at mHealth, CES, and all those 2015 launch events to-be-named-later, it is time to for you to revisit this guidance. Perhaps some time soon, your new or existing company will officially launch a new product or service, or perhaps a long-awaited, over-described and much-anticipated offering will finally ship. Here is a checklist that continues to hold true – with a few links that are merely examples:
Less movement and non-movement matter. The Washington Post ran an article recently about GreatCall's partnership with an AI company so that patterns and changes in behavior could be reported to family members from its wearable PERS device. Of course, tracking and reporting about changes from baselines -- that's nothing new for sensor-based home monitoring systems. But it is a surprisingly big deal in the PERS industry -- where even those who once supported pattern-detecting big ideas dropped them like a hot rock -- in favor of the transactional PERS world -- press the button and someone will come. The most radical changes in that industry over five years, fall detection and GPS tracking, have still been transactional -- Mrs. Smith, we are responding, are you okay? -- versus, I'm Mrs. Smith's device, and based on her behavior changes, she is not okay.
I quit Facebook and life, such as it was, went on. I quit because its business tactics were becoming ever so more UnFriendly-like -- from experiments with the product of us to selling your browsing history to selling your facial profile to advertisers. Then over to tracking your TV-watching habits and listening to voices on your mobile device, Facebook will soon opt into your health information -- thus forcing more privacy Opt-Outs. So time without Facebook slowly passed, then the 14-day post-deletion period -- are you sure, sure, sure? You can still re-activate! -- that grace period came and quietly went. No one, myself included, noticed my disappearance on that day. I did not request my archive of 7+ years of posts, I did not write down a list of those 300 or so folks that I had 'friended' over the years, apparently an average number for all users, and I did not note the businesses that had requested that I Like them. Without a glance back, I left all those pictures of just-cooked or about-to-be-eaten meals, graduation pictures of people I no longer knew (and thus probably don't really Like all that much), timelines, new feeds, and even groups, including alumni of gone companies from my many gone jobs. But I am not the only one departing -- looks like some younger people are getting out too.
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