CES Makes a Healthcare Splash

The data is out there. We only have to decide to use it.

Everywhere we go, we leave "data exhaust." It starts when you wake up and check your phone. Now there's a record that this guy's no longer asleep. Like little bread crumbs, we are our own life recorders. Our phones know where we go and how long it takes to get there.

On the Internet, our intentions are exquisitely captured by a series of privacy-bending technologies that watch our surfing and searching history and tailor ads personally to us. I can't tell you how ads for vendor-neutral archives find me even when I'm checking ESPN, but given what I do for a living, I can hazard a guess.

There is one and only one place each year where the tech-minded assemble to swap stories and gawk at the latest manifestations of the digital fishbowl that is our total lives today. So I too found my way to Las Vegas for last week's Consumer Electronics Show, which also featured conferences-within-conferences on digital health, fitness technology, and technologies for seniors.

I've watched these mini-conferences incubating for the past four years, but this was the year they blew up. That's good—it means they're growing like crazy.

This was the first year that one of the biggest exhibitors at the Digital Health Summit was a healthcare payer. You heard that right—United Healthcare had a huge booth at CES, not to be outdone by Aetna, which grabbed the spotlight at last year's South by Southwest Interactive.

The HIMSS conference this was not. United's booth was dominated by a stage where "Dance Dance Revolution" songs blared and booth staff, attendees, and even United Healthcare Executive Vice President and Chief of Medical Affairs Reed V. Tuckson worked up a sweat before our interview with some fancy steps.

Tuckson is a man possessed by the mission of getting sedentary America out of its easy chairs—and away from the big-screen home entertainment systems the consumer electronic industry puts out in ever-increasing numbers.

I tried to make sense of how this consumer electronics inflection point is affecting healthcare. Late in the week, it hit me, while I was talking to a marketing blogger (a veteran of the Seattle grunge scene who used to let the band Nirvana practice in her basement after they got famous).

The business of leadership, of getting people to change, is the business of storytelling. Tuckson and other leaders of his caliber are shaping the stories that will persuade people to take care of their health, even when some part of them is resisting.

It's the kind of dynamic that turns an inane viral video like PSY's "Gangnam Style" into an enticement to exercise, via a game like Nintendo's "Just Dance 4," where the app store features this song and daughters beg their fathers to download the song, and then work out to it for hours.

Health has to become a lot more fun, and technology is making it happen. One of the most popular workout apps for mobile phones last year was called "Zombies, Run!" If you don't run—really run—zombies in the game catch you (and eat your brains, no doubt). Yes, it's ridiculous, but like PSY's song, it changes behavior.

There was much talk at the Digital Health Summit about wiring all these innovations together, in a long chain that connects patients, providers, payers, public health officials, and research. Such wiring has only just begun, and will take some years. But it's coming.

Then there's the cutting edge, and boy, are there some wild things going on right now at that front.

A company called Salutron is building watches with an inexpensive set of sensors for collecting all sorts of vital signs right on people's wrists. A recent acquisition lets Salutron marry talent and inventions from two sources: DARPA sensor research and technology that is already present in exercise equipment in gyms throughout the country.

This will give the watches the ability to accommodate all manner of wrists, so the devices can deal with sweat, physiological differences, and the kind of real-world quirks that trip up so many kinds of consumer and even medical technology.

And on the far, far cutting edge at CES was Fulton Innovations, which at first didn't appear to have anything to do with healthcare. That's often how it starts at CES.

What caught my eye was a consumer packaged goods box, with ink on one part of the box that was blinking. Fulton uses something called the Wireless Power Standard to deliver a little electric current to a polymer-based ink printed on the box in order to illuminate it.

I spent a few minutes marveling at this, talking to company officials. Then they told me something relating to healthcare that blew my mind.

The same polymer-based ink process could create a temporary tattoo that could be used to collect certain vital signs from the wearer via wireless power, and deliver them to a compatible reader or maybe even appropriately outfitted mobile phones. Fulton hopes to have a demo later this year.

The implications are big. Printing remains one of the cheapest ways to distribute products. Ink-based printing still scales to huge numbers at unbeatably low cost.

This sort of unexpected innovation is what makes CES an event without parallel, and why the healthcare industry is increasingly attracted to it like a moth to a flame. Some technologies shown there never come to fruition, but what's a few moths getting burned?

A final wild story came from a guy I met in a hallway. Researchers at MIT have demonstrated that they can amplify motion in a video using variations in the frequency of color changes in a sequence of video frames, to quote their words. Users can specify the frequency range and degree of amplification desired. The technique works best for changes which are regular and re-occurring, such as heartbeats.

This technique can also be used to amplify changes that occur only once if the variation is wide enough. The system was originally intended to amplify changes in color, but turned out to be so sensitive in terms of motion amplification that the researchers reworked it to include the motion enhancement aspects.

Bottom line: video of people's facial features or the subtle pulsations of veins and arteries on their necks, collected from cameras on tablets, might be relevant in assessing changes in Grandma's health—without requiring a sensor, a patch, a temporary tattoo, or even a phone, just a camera.

Technology is hurtling toward healthcare at increasing speed. My challenge is to tell the stories of these innovations to quickly disrupt existing care systems and move the needle on healthcare costs.

Also at CES, I met Alan Greene, MD, chief medical officer of Scanadu, which is developing a noninvasive vital sign reader, akin to some of the patches that are making their way onto the market. Green demonstrated it to me by simply holding it to the temple of his head for a few seconds. But Scanadu has chosen to keep its product off the market until they can receive FDA clearance for use as a medical device.

That takes guts—and investors with lots of patience. There already are dozens of companies delivering non-FDA-approved, minimally tested gadgets with all sorts of health-improving claims. Quick bucks are being made, consumers will be angered, and probably new controlling legislation will at least be introduced and possibly passed.

But even at CES, in the heart of get-lucky, 24-hour Las Vegas, some healthcare technology innovators are waiting for the sure thing, and the right data, to really move the needle.