View from Digital Health - CES 2013

January 7, 2013

At the Digital Health Summit - a fast growing track in the recent CES show in Vegas - leaders in medicine, entrepreneurs and techies highlighted the opportunities and challenges in the growing fusion of mobile devices and health systems. Mobile devices are creating information trunk roads for data collected realtime from a patient or customer, uploading and rationalizing it in the cloud, and making it available in a simple format to physicians and patients alike. This capability offers the promise of better, cheaper care that is personalized to individual needs, and can provide tracking so that medications and wellness regimes can be fine-tuned to improve outcomes.The primary challenge for this innovation is that the fast, loose and ‘good enough’ tech culture has to join forces with the highly regulated and data driven clinical world - where sensitivity and specificity are required components of a therapeutic device or a diagnostic monitor. On top of that, the patient population of consumers is a very different market to address from the gadget-hungry consumer product market. The motivators for compliance are not the same as for the latest smartphone.

Ximedica has worked on a significant number of wearable devices, from simple vital signs monitors to diabetes pumps, pain management devices and brain-function monitors.

At the Digital Health Summit, our Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer Aidan Petrie spoke as part of a session called, ‘It’s All About Me!: Designing for the Healthy Consumer.’ The presentation can be found below, in which he highlights some of the considerations that entrepreneurs need to be aware of when tech gets medical.​