Our teams flew to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show 2020, from January 7 to 10, to detect and anticipate innovations for our customers and the Group. After three days there, Jérôme Malzac, Innovation Officer at Micropole, shares with us a selection of the best innovations in Smart Health.
Connected health made its show in Las Vegas
Every year, connected health, known as "Smart Health", occupies an increasingly important place at CES. I find it particularly represented by all countries, including FrenchTech. At first glance, the number of exhibitors in the health and wellness segment is up 25% this year, and Artificial Intelligence and 5G are certainly not for nothing since these technologies contribute to the development of connected and autonomous devices, and disrupt the ecosystems in health and many sectors.
Remote surgery devices, advanced diagnostic tools thanks to AI, trackers or other monitoring or prevention bracelets are becoming more and more important and their functionalities more and more rich. Apple, Google and Amazon are also trying to position themselves on this market. Conferences on the subject were flourishing, so it was difficult to reconcile my participation in conferences and the back and forth in the aisles to discover all the innovations. Luckily, many of them can be (re)viewed in replay!
It is always difficult to select a particular innovation or solution to highlight over another, as the ideas are so abundant and exciting. There are also devices that have already existed for several years and are only small evolutions or are based on existing devices. Here are the three themes and solutions on Smart Health to remember from this 2020 edition.
At the heart of the concerns: the protection of personal data
The protection of personal data has been discussed a lot, including in sectors other than health. Indeed, all these devices collect confidential data on your personal profile, your health and sometimes your care path or your treatments via several applications. Each one stores all or part of the information, but to date there is no regulation or protection - such as encoding or encryption - guaranteeing the anonymity and use of this data only within a specific framework, as is the case with medical confidentiality. Everything remains to be built on the subject, and as is often the case, technology and its application are advancing much faster than the reflection on the use of the data that results from it.
More and more accessible, accurate & available devices at home
We note that devices are overall more accessible, accurate and available in the home for immediate treatment or disease prevention. Many devices emphasize ease of daily use to bring health monitoring and disease anticipation into the home. These are no longer only usable in hospitals or medical centers, they can be used directly in the home and allow remote diagnosis.
Among the innovations is TytoCare, which created TytoHome, allowing you to perform a "health check" at home and get a remote diagnosis from a doctor, virtually. Various accessories allow to capture medical data, which will then be sent to a doctor for diagnosis: there is a stethoscope to capture the sound of the heart and listen to your pulse, a camera to observe the throat or ears or an integrated thermometer: everything to make a diagnosis without having to leave your home!
With Bisu Body Coach, the first intelligent urine analyzer that provides personalized health advice, there is no need to go to the collection center. A device that reinforces the idea that urine is a valuable indicator with a lot of information about our health.
Among the devices used in the monitoring and treatment or prevention of diseases is the "ScanWatch" connected watch from Withings, which was bought by Nokia before being bought by its co-founder and thus becoming a French start-up again. The latest version of the "ScanWatch" embeds various sensors capable of detecting atrial fibrillation and sleep apnea. The watch should even be certified as a medical device in the second half of the year, like the Apple Watch was last year.
While more than 7 million French people are affected by dyslexia, a technological solution proposes to correct this disorder: Lexilight, a lamp of a new kind which helps dyslexics to solve their reading problem . Thanks to a phenomenon of pulsed and modulated light, it allows to process the analyzed image by the brain so as not to have the mirror effect which causes dyslexia. And cocorico, it is to a French company that we owe this idea!
Wellness, the star of Smart Health
In this field, CES 2020 proposed many solutions capable of capturing and analyzing our emotions and our state of form in order to help us sleep or rest better. There are connected headbands that analyze brain waves and, thanks to AI, will make recommendations on your sleep cycles, falling asleep or waking up.
How can we not end this summary on Smart Health without talking about the dozens of connected toothbrushes that measure brushing efficiency and duration, including Oral-B's smart brush or Colgate's Plaqless Pro.
There's also the DnaBand, a new kind of connected bracelet: it combines the health data it captures with DNA tests to recommend products that are good or bad for your health.
On the connected beauty side, we'll remember Opte, the first wearable makeup printer offered by P&G Ventures. Introduced to the public last year, it is able to apply makeup and detect brown spots or discoloration on your skin, and dispense tiny drops of a miraculous vitamin-enriched skin serum.
In conclusion, AI is more and more present in health care and can be found everywhere. To go further, we could talk about AIs that read medical reports and cross-reference the data with prescriptions to validate whether the treatment is appropriate, or AIs that are part of medical imaging and are able to diagnose cancers at a very early stage
I am particularly impressed to see all these possibilities but I am convinced that they will never replace a real health check-up with a blood test, medical imaging or a real urine bottle!
To follow our next forums on CES 2020: stay tuned!
