Partnering with Microsoft, the Digital Health Summit called attention to consumer innovations such as robotic limbs and smart pills as some of the "game-changing" innovations in health care.
At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas, a Digital Health Summit event highlighted some
innovative "game changers" poised to change elder care, implants and
medication management.
Organizing the Jan. 7
Digital
Health Summit were Jill Gilbert, a product strategist and co-founder of
elder care resource Gilbert Guide, as well as veteran technology editor Robin
Raskin, who founded Living in Digital Times, a firm that produced many events
at CES, including Last Gadget Standing and the Fitness Tech Summit. Linda
Nessim-Rubin, a partner in Living in Digital Times, also headed up the event.
Amid the bright lights and hoopla at CES every year, Gilbert brought in
Microsoft as a leader in the technology space to help introduce the innovations
in digital health.
"We realized that there's some sense of 'flashiness' to our show, and
yet I had a huge responsibility to make sure that it maintained health
respectability within the industry,"
Gilbert told eWEEK. "So
it made sense to have Microsoft partner with us and also make sure these
technologies were in the room."
Randy Fusco, Microsoft's chief technology officer for Health & Life
Sciences for Providers, moderated the health care "game changers"
session.
"New technology advancements, including cloud computing, personal
health devices, touch-screen consumer electronics and those highlighted here
today are all poised to dramatically change the HIT
landscape in 2011 and beyond," Fusco said in a statement.
Gilbert discussed with eWEEK some of this year's game-changing technologies
in digital health, several of which were geared toward helping groups such as
the elderly stay safe at home and improving quality of life.
Healthsense
Healthsense is a company focused on technology for the aging. It offers a
secure standards-based WiFi platform called eNeighbor for responding to a
family member's personal emergencies and tracking a person's activities. It can
be used in the home or in a health care facility.
WiFi pendants, pull cords and call buttons alert nurses in the event of an
emergency. Meanwhile, the Healthsense Web portal allows health professionals or
caregivers to access patient information, protected by 128-bit SSL
(Secure Sockets Layer) encryption.
The portal supports text-to-speech functionality and allows caregivers to
create patient reports and compile data on call pendant usage and response
times. They can also configure reminders to check on the patient.
"It not only helps caregivers track activities of daily living, but
also monitor safety," Gilbert said. "It's a great development in
aging and place technology."
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