The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which ended on Friday January 11th, included the launch of some incredible equipment able to monitor physical activity, detect possible healthcare problems before symptoms appear and find solutions for both common disorders such as obesity and diabetes and much rarer medical conditions.
One trend, which may not be precisely new but was prominent this year was “game-ification” – which uses a model from the videogame industry to provide the user with points and rewards that help them to watch their health and reduce costs. These kind of applications are especially appealing to a younger audience. For example the company UnitedHealthcare presented a product it has developed in partnership with Konami Digital Entertainment which is designed to help reduce childhood obesity through a new dance game that challenges young people to meet certain goals as well as monitoring determined factors such as the body mass index and speed of calorie use.
Other companies launched ingenious initiatives based on mobile applications to improve healthcare treatment.
The software giant SAP has developed an application called “Circles of Care” that allow a parent or another adult to manage the healthcare treatment of their children with a large number of specialists and other carers.
The program, which has not yet gone on sale to the public but his available free was developed by an SAP employee to coordinate consults between various pediatric specialists for children with rare conditions.
The application may be able to help people with special needs and the company is working with the Alzheimer’s Association and the Breast Cancer Foundation to generate interest in the platform.
At the moment the application is a non-profit initiative but SAP is considering how best to work with electronic health records, said a company spokesman.
Other exhibitors at CES presented armbands and other similar apparatus that can monitor indicators such as heart rate or provide real time supervision of blood sugar levels for people with diabetes. Another company presented a digital fork that monitors calorie intake and vibrates if the user is eating too much or too quickly.
