CES 2015 - The Year of Digital Health and Wearables

This year I have the privilege of attending CES2015 in Las Vegas - for those of you who have not been before its big..even by Las Vegas standards.

CES attracts 150,000 visitors (all looking for the same cabs so I’m willing to bet that Uber is not going to work as well), occupies 2,000,000 sq ft of space (35 football fields - American or the rest of the world soccer) and includes 3,500 companies

This year the DigitalHealthCES meeting runs concurrently and I believe is in its 4th year. Further evidence of the merger of health, consumer and the engaged patient equipped with mobile technology and wearables.

As my friend John Lynn said in his post Initial CES 2015 Observations. He sees the top trends as

• 3D Printers
• Drones, and
• Wearables

The first two not closely linked to healthcare (except perhaps this recent recent student suggestion of an Ambulance drone to deliver help to heart attack victims).

Wearables are front and center and John cites the Amstrip company with a band aid style monitoring concept. I expect clothing and in particular sports to lead this charge with the initial interest in optimizing training and athletic performance as we saw from the World Cup last year and the miCoach system from Adidas that was in use by the winners Germany.

Needless to say others are joining the fray with clothing brands such as Asics, Under Armour and Ralph Lauren now offering clothes to monitor all sorts of parameters

This year may see the emergence of more from the Internet of Things (IoT) - or the new term the Internet of Everything (IoE).

Everything connected and controlled through a consumer friendly hub which will include the wearable and monitoring concepts.

This is as simple as ceiling fans and cooling systems and thermostats but with healthcare making this even more interesting and the learning potential of these intelligent systems and their Artificial Intelligence offering insights into our lives to help turn unhealthy behaviors and activities into healthy choices.

So much of our healthcare expenditure is related to chronic care management, imagine the impact this level of synergy and motivation will have on driving a healthier population while reducing cost.

I’m ready, are you?

Speech and Medical Intelligence – Allowing Doctors to Focus on Patients Not Technology

I am at Medicine 2.0 this week and will be participating on the panel Bridging the Digital Divide and will then be presenting: Speech and Medical Intelligence – Allowing Doctors to Focus on Patients Not Technology

This is an exciting time for mobile devices and while we know there is a discrepancy in the accessibility of mobile technology (I’ll be participating on the panel Bridging the Patient Digital Divide) some of this divide in access can be linked to the complexity of this technology.
With ubiquitous technology comes ubiquitous complexity - adn this is especially true for doctors who face challenging User Interfaces - captured here in this post: How Bad UX Killed Jenny. As doctors we feel we are loosing touch with the Art of Medicine

Which for many of us was the reason we started on the journey to being a healer. Physicians don’t go to medical school because they want to document and code clinical information. Doctors choose their path because of their compassion and desire to deliver care to patients in need. There are increasing physician frustrations with technology and their struggle to keep the focus on patients and not data entry.

Medicine is part science, part art. The relationship between physicians and patients is at the core of healing. This begins with hearing and understanding but is followed by focusing on the patient not the technology. I will be presenting our prototype “Florence” that combines artificial intelligence and speech recognition to offer innovative new speech technologies that help capture and understand not just what the clinician says but what they mean. With new tools that speech enabled systems we simplify access and empower clinicians to capture information and thoughts as they occur. Through the innovative use of natural language tools, context awareness and the generation of high-value clinically actionable medical information clinical systems become efficiently integrated into care delivery process offering the opportunity for doctors to return to the Art of Medicine and focus on the patient.

Here’s a video showing off Florence

Speech and the Digital healthcare Revolution at #SpeechTek

Come join me in the conversation with my colleagues at the SpeechTek 2014 conference in Marriott Hotel in Time Square, Manhattan New York.

The Panel: C103 – PANEL: The Digital Healthcare Revolution at 1:15 p.m - 2:00 p.m. The panel moderator Bruce Pollock, Vice-President, Strategic Growth and Planning at West Interactive and on Social Media @brucepollock

I will be joined by Daniel Padgett, Director, Voice User Experience at Walgreens and on Social Media at @d_padgett and David Claiborn, Director of Service Experience Innovation at United Health Group.

We will be discussing the opportunities and challenges associated with the current digital healthcare revolution and of course how speech plays an essential role in integrating this technology while maintaining the human component of medicine that we all want. Rather than Neglecting the patient in the era of health IT and EMR

We have progressed from the world of Sir Lancelot Spratt


And the Doctor need to look at the patient not the technology perhaps in a cooperative Digital Health world like this

Is this future of Virtual Assistant Interaction good, desirable

Demo Video 140422 from Geppetto Avatars on Vimeo.

We will be discussing

• What are the biggest obstacles to digital healthcare becoming a reality?
• Where do speech technologies bring the most value to healthcare?
• How will health providers, insurers, and payers provide patient support in the world of digital healthcare?

Perhaps the emerging Glass concepts improve this interaction as they are exploring in Seattle

Join us for analysis of the state of digital healthcare today and predictions for its future.

In the end

People forget what you said and what you did but they remember how you made them feel

Come join the discussion as we explore the digital technology and how it should be used in healthcare and how speech can help

Virtual Assistants in your Future - Personal Healthcare Delivered

You can always rely on Hollywood to take concepts and extend them into the future - sometimes correctly (cloaking, holographic TV, forcefields and eco skeletons with mind control), sometimes incorrectly (aluminum dresses, atmosphere that is completely controlled, suspension bridge apartment housing). We have had speech recognition and Spock's request:

So it was no surprise to find the latest Hollywood idea is the "Her" - a lonely writer develops a relationship with a newly developed operation system

Intriguing and challenging our current concepts with an exploration of artificial intelligence, voice and natural language technologies. These new styled avatars understand, listen and decipher what we say and something that Nuance has been developing and reinventing the relationship that people and technology can have. We can engage with our devices on our own terms and we have show these concepts in healthcare with our very own Florence - who is getting ready to launch in 2014

Ambitious you say - maybe but imagine the environment with intelligent personal assistants that hear you, understand you, know your likes and preferences – and in our world exist across your doctors office, the phone, surgery, hospital and elderly care and hospice. Cool? Liberating? Impossible?

If you’re Nuance, the idea is not only brilliant – it’s our focus and drive as we reinvent the relationship between people and technology. It is the chance to connect with your devices on human terms and presents infinite possibilities for intuitive interfaces that adapt to you.

Liberating our clinicians to focus on the patient and providing patients with someone they can talk to, interact with and who does have time for them. That future - coming to a doctors office near you:

Artificial Intelligence - Good or Bad

I received a link form a friend to this article Robots, Soldiers, & Cyborgs: The Future Of Warfare - I think in part because I post on the value and opportunity of the intelligent agent
In fact I just talked about this recently around the concept of smart shelves instead of selling shelves. It was this comment in the article that stood out

Are we at the beginning of an inevitable process leading to the rise of “killer robots” predicted by science fiction, or can robots actually make war less destructive?

We know technology can be used for good and bad but even with the concern of the possible super soldier ala Terminator and the Rise of the Machines in Judgement Day...as seen in the opening scene from Terminator 2



Remember folks - this is Hollywood. No battery or power issues amongst the many other challenging technical problems. There is a school of thought that we will reach singularity and artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence that will "radically change human civilization, and perhaps even human nature itself.

Critics are also concerned that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) could develop in directions not anticipated by scientists. Because of this unpredictability, the US military has indicated that it will never remove humans from the decision loop completely. While unmanned weapons systems will become gradually more autonomous so that they can carry out very specific missions with less human direction, they may never entirely replace human soldiers on the battlefield.

While there is some potential for the bad I remain optimistic that the inherent good prevails - we develop smarter, faster and better technology to deliver an improved world and a new era of Super Intelligence that will chaperone in a new and exciting era

Meanwhile adding medical intelligence to the systems we interact with to simplify the interaction freeing people up to focus on tasks and the individual - not the technology offers interesting and exciting potential and I found this latest piece Startup Gets Computers to Read Faces, Seeks Purpose Beyond Ads on reading faces another step toward intelligence which like the smart supermarket shelves can be used for good or bad....
Imagine the doctors office or even the hospital waiting area that is using technology to triage patents intelligently based on their needs not the time of their arrival.

Life is good - my glass is always full