CES 2014 Coverage: Medical Tech, Media Creation and Management
For the third year in a row, we find ourselves at CES. Honestly, it’s still lots of fun. Everyone at the office knows I am wandering around like a kid in a candy store. I am a tech nerd and really never get tired of seeing the giant displays, the gaming rigs and the oodles of gadgets that promise to make my iPhone or iPad even more indispensible.
This year, we are going to get more serious about two important industries where mobile technology and raw processing power are causing seizmic shifts in their markets: Medical Devices and Healthcare services and media creation and management.
Digital Health is the Big Deal it Should Be
CES 2014 is host to over 300 Digital Health exhibitors this year, nearly double that of last year. While I have read stories concerning the multiplication of fitness applications and sensors, tech to aid an aging boomer population remain at home instead of a nursing home and real time monitoring of a variety of data streams for services (again for that aging population), my focus this year is on tech that enables better clinical outcomes while offering an improved health economics picture for those who deliver healthcare in both a consumer and clinical oriented environment. While the stories most widely covered are important (the better the sensor technology, robustness of data and applications using this data to make clinical sense of the information , the better health our population will experience), our healthcare providers need the edge they can receive from technology enablement.
I believe this will become a critical opportunity for our healthcare system to become more efficient, better leverage experience and use information and better visibility into procedure components that will reduce errors and care delivery time requirements while simultaneously offering reductions in error rates and increasing the quality of care. As someone who has been involved in the healthcare marketplace for over 32 years, it is exciting to see many of the promises for the future become a reality today.
Media Creation and Management: Mobile Content Creation Marches Forward
The second half of what I am most interested in are those who are creating devices, applications and services which can assist mobile media creators to make better use of their assets through better creative expression, as well as those who use video and photos for more utilitarian purposes (an attitudinal segmentation we performed recently showed record keepers and memory makers are a big group). While the fact we have these crazy 1080p mobile video shooters in our pockets is old news, other than what is available on Instagram and vine and a handful of others, this isn’t really a nut that has been cracked.
There is also room for services which better allow for the easier storage of video for contexual use on the consumer side.
Onward to the show hall; it is always an exciting moment for me to see the big displays of technology. I will post pictures.
