Remote monitoring

An upcoming and splashy event looms – time to market.  We are in the fall show season and it shows. So the new product isn’t really tested past a slick prototype, but the brochures must get to the printers NOW. Why?  CES (or Connected Health, ATA, or the mHealth Summit) is on the calendar and innovation is expected, no actually, innovation is mandated.  For the price of a booth, press release, brochures, a demo device and all travel costs, marketers must market. Whether the product works? Not important for demo purposes.  Does anyone need the offering? See the hype for 2010 launch of Healthrageous and now see the 2013 shutdown.

What goes around comes around and gets a new market sizing. You may have seen a rather giddy press release recently that sized the market for aging in place technology at a cool $30 billion by 2017.  The global market for elder care technologies will hit $7.2 billion by 2018 and as for home monitoring of seniors, the number of units of wearable wireless devices will climb from 3 million units (2011) to 36 million units by 2017, and users of family locator services (including PERS) will reach 70 million by 2016. It’s a good thing these sizings forecast three to four years from now. That will give everyone time to overcome barriers that hamstring utilization today -- like controlling the cost of device, figuring out who pays for them and will the target user actually be able to afford to use it/wear it to help them stay safe or will the doctor and supporting staff remain engaged to help the user keep their chronic disease(s) under control?

Incubators and contests -- do they enable innovation?  Paul Krugman's interesting article about GE’s competition to find a new design raises a question about how to boost innovation and lower its cost. If you read the article, entitled 'Complexity is Free' – you will discover how a simple contest, fielded internationally, generated a design improvement at almost no cost for GE: "The winning prize pool [was] $20,000, spread out across 8 finalists, with awards ranging from $1,000 to $7,000 each." So for $20K, GE got something it wanted, layered that something into a design process that enables continuous revision to designs without new infrastructure investment (the 'free' in the title.) Does anyone else find it interesting that there was no internal engineer who could figure out how to design a lighter-weight bracket component -- and that a contest was required? Or was this a publicity stunt to generate good will for GE?