Zehnder Explores CES 2020: Day Three
Our Final Day at CES!
We've sent our Creative Technologist, Rob Hudak, to CES 2020 to check out the latest, greatest and weirdest tech trends happening at the expo. If you missed our Day Two recap, check it out here: Zehnder Explores CES 2020: Day Two
The future of Health and Wellness
Today I made my way to the Venetian, another large footprint of CES, where the Procter & Gambles of the world showcase the latest in Health and Wellness and the startups in Eureka park look for investors and partners for their cutting-edge products. It was overwhelming to say the least. Here’s a recap of what I found the most interesting.
Health & Wellness
After taking a total of 35,000 steps in the last two days and averaging about 4 hours of sleep a night, the Health and Wellness tech at CES looked like an Oasis to me. I did not need a biometric reading to tell me I needed a rest, but there were plenty of consumer products in the show to give me the data I needed to do everything from getting better sleep, to improving my knee pain.
Biometrics are here to help us improve our health
Biometric sensors are everywhere. They are being used to help doctors and patients make better decisions about their health. They are also crucial to making the future of online doctor visits more thorough.
Devices for self examination to aid remote doctor visits are already developed and are being tested, mostly in European markets due to strict restrictions in the US. Soon they will be par for the course. CES Innovation Awards Honoree, the MedWand, houses multiple diagnostic tools in a single easy-to-use handheld device. Created by physicians and medical device engineers, the MedWand can take your temperature, look in your ear canal, examine your skin, look down your throat and even do an infrared scan of your eyes. With the MedWand on the patient’s side clinicians can conduct remote office visits with the aid of the real-time data it provides.
For more day-to-day health and wellness biometrics, one needs to look no further than the bathroom. The “smart bath mat” by Mateo gives you your weight and body composition, along with a posture analysis. It also tracks your “posture evolution.”
And if that’s not enough. Would a $2,000 toothbrush interest you? That’s what Oral-B is bringing to market in their Genius X toothbrush. It uses Artificial Intelligence to “Recognize your brushing, for best results every day.”
But before you spend all this time in the bathroom you want to make sure you have a pleasant experience there. That’s why P&G Labs and Charmin invented a technology they call SmellSense that reads the amount of gasses given off when a human releases them and sends them to a device outside the door that says “you might want to wait a minute before entering.” I was not expecting bathroom humor from CES 2020, but there you have it.
The Future of Skin Care
LED technology had a big presence at the Venetian. The colors of LED are reported to have different effects - the color blue can get rid of blemishes, the color red can help with relaxation or sore muscles. There were many mirrors and masks that used LED technology for these purposes. The company Neurocare had a bright display of LED masks and accessories. Their Climax Full Body LED Hydro Table, which looked like a see-through waterbed lit from underneath with LED, could help you relax and provide relief for sore muscles depending on the intensity level of the red LED.
My favorite new item in the skin care department was the Opte skin printer. A handheld printer that "scans for tonal variations in your skin, detects age spots and hyperpigmentation and corrects tonal variations with Optimizing Serum.” It’s basically a tiny ink-jet printer that covers up your freckles or age spots perfectly by making a few passes over the area and adding the right amount of corrective pigment until it “reveals the natural beauty of your skin.” It covers your blemishes using 97% less product on your skin than alternatives such as your average cover up makeup. It does this by using 120 thermal ink-jet nozzles that deposit the “Optimizing Serum” (a fancy word for the makeup ink) by the percoliter, which is one billionth of a liter. Just three tones cover "99% of women’s complexions." I watched in awe as it “removed” a freckle from my forearm by covering it with an exact match of my pigment with only a few short passes.
Caring for Others - From Fall Prevention for the Elderly to Baby’s Health
There were many solutions showcased for those most in need of care by other family members. Fall prevention had solutions in the startup categories using everything from radar that attaches to your wall to depth detecting cameras. These creations help to track behavior as well for instance. It will detect a major fall, but if someone is not waking up at an hour they usually do, it will also send an alert. A statistic was mentioned to me that 85% of falls are not reported, so these monitors hope to provide more accurate data to caregivers when it comes to taking care of the elderly.
The most aesthetically pleasing wearable was the Smart Belt by Welt. A wearable that takes the form of a fashionable leather belt, with many stylistic varieties to choose from, it offers a 360º reading around your waist to provide data on the wearers gait. This data can be used to send signals to the user or their caregivers that they are not as well balanced as they need to be, or their gait may be a bit off, showing signs of potential problems that can be solved preventatively. Of course they also detect major falls as part of their alert system. As nice as they looked I wouldn’t mind having one myself. But I’d prefer mine to be enhanced with Artificial Intelligence that loosened and tightened it depending on how much King Cake I’ve had during Mardi Gras season.
Wearables are also big for babies, from prenatal to infant monitoring. Owlet has a wearable that expecting mothers can wear on their tummy during pregnancy to monitor their baby’s heartbeat within the mobile app. After the baby is born, Owlet provides a wearable that wraps around the infant's foot to monitor their BPM and oxygen while they sleep.
Speaking of sleep, this big baby is tired. There's a lot more to tell you about, but I think I will tend to my own health and wellness and save those goodies for another installment.
Keep Up with us at CES
Read more of Rob’s journey throughout CES! Follow us on social media for live takeovers and tech spotlights. Stay tuned for our expo wrap up and top takeaways and reach out to us at beyond@z-comm.com on how we can apply tech to your brand.
