Highlights in Digital Health @ CES 2025
I found the Digital Health track of CES 2025 to be both informative and inspirational. I spent most of my time consuming digital health track content, visiting digital health booths to learn as much as I could about the latest in digital health innovation.
Consumer health devices are providing ever broadening and deepening insight into lifestyle behaviors and even diagnostic health signals, with intersectionality into smart fashion and smart homes. These devices focus on letting people know what is going on in their bodies so that they can get healthy and stay healthy as well as prevent, diagnose, manage, and even support reversal of chronic conditions. With more and more people taking a DIY approach to managing their health, the accessibility and increasing capabilities of these devices is very exciting. Many of them are sold direct 2 consumer only and not approved for the diagnosis or treatment of a disease. Though panelists in "The Future of Funding: Investment Trends Shaping Tomorrow's Care" made the point that companies should try to achieve FDA approval, even though the process is hard.
Smart Watches & Rings
The smart watch and ring category is getting more and more glamorous with fab watches and rings featuring enhanced sensing abilities and some on the market with a very affordable price (the Amazfit Active 2 smart watch is $99). The Circular Ring 2 specifically contains an FDA-approved ECG sensor for AFib detection. Apple made similar news last year for FDA approval for AFib detection in the apple watch as a MDDT. The Noise Luna Ring (shown above) offers biometric data monitoring, sleep tracking, and wellness insights.
Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM)
As a category, CGMs help people to understand specifically how what they eat and drink impacts their glucose levels. This knowledge can help diabetics, pre-diabetics, those looking to lose weight and athlete's looking to optimize performance. Abbott presented their Minimally invasive CGM, Lingo ($49 for a two week use, $89 per month or $249 for 3 months) and Dexcom introduced Stelo and a partnership with Oura Ring. CGMs get even more exciting with the announcement of noninvasive solutions from Samsung and MOGLU. Neither are FDA approved though Moglu is conducting clinical trials with Joslin Diabetes Center. Alex Ohanian appeared on the Abbott Lingo panel and shared his personal use of the device and the experience he had with it. He mentioned repeatedly the importance of user experience for the quality and adoption of health tech - to which I let out a highly audible "WOOT"! Thanks Alex! :)
Smart Mirrors
The "concept car" of non-invasive sensing was OMNIA, a smart mirror demoed at the Withings booth. Withings has a suite of health sensing wearables and devices and this smart scale and mirror would do a complete health scan should it hit the market "leveraging AI to aggregate, analyze, and interpret key indicators such as heart health, nutrition trends, body composition, lung function, activity tracking and sleep quality." (withings)
Smart Bathroom
A smart mirror could go in a smart bathroom, complete with a smart toilet. Vivoo offers smart toilets (300k are already in homes) and at-home urine tests that can measure hydration levels, inflammation markers, and at CES 2025 they announced new capabilities including reproductive health tests that measure hormone levels.
Smart Textiles
Skiin Generation 2 from Myant, featured washable fabrics that offer continuous medical-grade remote monitoring of ECG, cuffless blood pressure, breathing pattern and volume, core body temperature, posture and sleep quality. This technology can be featured on an arm or chest band. Other companies like Veriowell and Itri presented bed solutions that track heart rate, sleep, and bed exits. On a panel, the CEO of BloomerTech discussed the wearable ECG bra her company has created for cardiovascular health.
FemTech
As a woman in menopause, I appreciated hearing women fearlessly shared their health story - especially as the number of women in menopause and the size of the menopause industry continues to soar. Of specific note was the "Vital Voices: Champions of Women's Health Innovation" panel where Kamili Wilson of AARP and Claret Circle pointed out that women's menopause symptoms are under-researched, under-treated and un-accounted for in the workplace. Her organization, Claret Circle seeks to normalize conversations about Menopause. Peri also announced a wearable designed to help people track and manage perimenopause symptoms.
D2C Pharma
The health ecosystem is very fractured and leaves the patient at the center to navigate on their own. In the spirit of bridging some gaps and smoothing the process, Eli Lily showed their new D2C program Lily Direct. Lily Direct enables patients to contact Lily directly for a prescription and get the drug delivered to their doorstep. Pfizer announced a similar program, "Pfizer for All" in 2024. I can't help but wonder if my personal show favorite Coldsnap (the keurig of ice cream) will provide nutraceutical smoothies in the future that a doctor could prescribe. Not too far of a leap considering the current nutritional value of their smoothies!
The Power of Agentic AI
Many new products, services and panel discussions explored how AI agents could provide greater value to patients and clinicians from managing the administrative aspect of health to wayfinding and decision support to the provision of medical care.
Nvidia recently announced collaboration with "Hippocratic AI", a company that provides a $9 an hour Nurse that engages with patients but does not make medical diagnoses. Even if companies say their AI doesn't diagnose, a recent study found that of 2,000 American adults, 52% gave symptoms to an AI system like ChatGPT and over 83% report that the AI got the diagnosis right. Just like AI can pass the Bar exam, AI agents in the future may become certified to practice medicine in certain environments. This could dramatically improve access to healthcare at a lower cost which in and of itself could improve health outcomes.
“AI agents will revolutionize healthcare by managing tasks such as appointment scheduling, patient care, monitoring vital signs, administering medication, and providing personalized treatment. This will enhance service efficiency, reduce human error, and improve patient outcomes, positioning healthcare as a frontrunner in AI-driven innovation.”
- Steven Webb, UK chief technology and innovation officer, Capgemini
To be sure, there is unlimited potential for the application of AI in the health industry. The question becomes how will AI in healthcare be applied, evaluated, scaled, monetized and regulated? How will clinicians leverage agentic AI? How will patients? How do we ensure the application of ethics such that human beings are treated with dignity? If these solutions improve the experience of health as well as health outcomes, their scale could lead to rapid improvements. But if these solutions are detrimental to the experience of health or outcomes, their scale could lead to rapid harm. We hoped that the introduction of EHRs would revolutionize the health industry for the better, but they have led to clinican burdenment, deteriorated experiences and have not fully lived up to their promise. The application of AI in health could shave administrative and operational costs for health organizations and that could lead to massive adoption, but will things be better for the people those organizations serve?
I believe technology should serve humanity - not the other way around. I can't help but thinking about this great line from Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
Without a doubt, there is a HUGE opportunity here to improve the human condition, but it could quickly go the other way. Futures thinking and vision work become very important here. I am personally extremely interested in defining the aspirational futures of the application of AI In healthcare to stimulate innovation in a positive direction as well as exploring dark futures and unintended consequences for effective risk mitigation.
Connecting it All
Consumer health devices and services have the power to help people live healthier lives through enhanced understanding and early detection, but how will this information be shared with and presented to the care team? Bridging the gap between people's daily lives and their clinical journey is of critical importance. Validic, thankfully, is on it. They announced the integration of physical activity data from over 350 wearables and smartwatches into EHR clinical workflows (like Epic and Oracle Health). This kind of integration will enable healthcare providers to deliver more tailored and personalized healthcare and education for patients. The proliferation of sensing devices combined with EHR integration makes me wonder how a proactive emergency care model in the future may behave. What if your smart home health or wearable device detects something before you do? Would you be alerted via AI, human outreach or an EMT showing up at your front door?
See you later!
As for me? I will definitely be attending CES next year and possibly CTA's Digital Health summit this June in Boston as well. I hope to see you there!
