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Rock Health buries the lead -- consumers don't want to share with tech firms. [Rant on.] Digital health firms are having a tough time, despite upwards of $6 billion from me-too investors, and that's just last year. The Rock Health Digital Health Consumer Adoption Survey 2015 of 4017 people is a testimonial to the mismatch between investor optimism and consumer skepticism. On the skepticism front, blame is placed on a variety of factors, including lack of sharing of data across health providers ('Tech companies don't have the problem, it's the siloed health institutions.') But wait. "The contenders–Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Samsung—all fared poorly, with approximately 5 percent of people saying they’d share with these companies. Facebook was the outlier -- only 2% would share health or DNA data with the social network." Duh. Despite a few hysterically enthusiastic reads of this data, like Forbes, a few saw gloom. Kudos to MIT Technology Review and a few others for noting the tech company chart, small and at the end of the report.

Less mHealth and more HealthIT. When Lenovo displays a full size cutaway blade server at the entrance to its booth, you can surmise that the mHealth Summit is more IT than personal/mobile. HIMSS, the media company for health IT events, seems to have lost interest in selling booth space for their mHealth Exhibit Hall. Most visitors I talked with were disappointed at the reduced scale of the event, which is now combined with the Cybersecurity Summit, PopHealth Summit, Global mHealth Forum. Perhaps this was an optimization strategy? Free up the month of December? At any rate here are five new technologies from this event that could potentially benefit boomers and seniors, content is from the companies:

The Internet of "Healthy" Things.  The Internet of Things (IoT) has provided material for many markets, so the acronym begs for reuse and recycle. Consider the Internet of Caring Things, (gadgets that note worrisome changes in wellbeing). Then there’s the Internet of Everyday Things (think vacuuming and thermostats), the Internet of Transportation Things (that's cars and truck stuff), the Internet of Medical Things (old term: Health IT), etc. The 2015 Connected Health Symposium was sponsored by Boston’s sprawling care delivery system, Partners Healthcare. So last week's IoT boomlet was sub-titled: The Internet of Healthy Things, and included improving patient digital experience through 'better understanding of their emotions' through the use of facial, voice, and other indicators.

Just as interest is heating up, could adoption stall?  Turns out we’ve been in an innovators' bubble for Digital Health's Hype-and-Hope (HAH). Who knew there were 10 indicators of doom ahead? Stating the obvious, 'entrepreneurs are creating products patients don’t want to use' and there aren’t enough 'reimbursement incentives to drive providers to prescribe.'  And those creating wearable and mobile variants seem to have missed sight of the target market – that is, boomers and beyond.

Let's start at the conclusion -- the hype hasn't produced health for boomers.  The new California Health Care Foundation sponsored boomer health tech report is out.  First the bad news. Baby boomers (aged 50-69 in 2015) aren't getting the health innovation investment money's worth, though the spigot is wide open for digital health funding.  Which is odd because they represent the single largest cohort that generates health cost, possibly as a result of their more sedentary lifestyle, compared to the previous generations.  Health care costs are often described in the press as going down, but really only the rate of increase is slowing – according to PwC, the growth rate still outpaces inflation.