Next week is the annual CES conference in Las Vegas. It’s a unique event that brings together 170,000 people across 4 of the largest conference venues in the world. It’s enormous and a little hard to process.
Having attended for the last ~11 years, it’s been amazing to see the pace of progress with so many technologies. Remember that it’s only been about 9 years since the iPhone was launched. While smartphones and tablets have gotten so much better over this time period a whole slew of other consumer technologies have as well.
Looking forward to CES, it’s amazing to see the development of things like: 3D Printing, Virtual Reality, Augmented reality, IoT (Internet of Things…or as I like to call it Smart Everything), voice recognition, AI, robotics, sensors, etc etc etc. It’s an exciting time to be in an industry where so many things are developing so quickly.
Maybe I’m skewed because I’m a blogger in healthcare, but it’s really amazing how healthcare sits at the confluence of so many of these technologies. The overlap that’s going to happen between augmented reality, 3D printing, AI, sensors and new things we barely understand is going to be extraordinary.
I recently saw a 3D printing conference for healthcare. While 3D printing is very exciting for healthcare, it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if we didn’t have all of the other innovations in cameras, storage, data sharing, virtual reality, etc. We needed evolutions and innovations in all of these spaces for the other technologies to really work well.
I’ve often said that the most interesting things in healthcare happen at the intersections. I think that’s particularly true in the digital health space. As I head to CES, I’ll be watching for this type of crossover of technologies. I think this year we’re going to see a lot of companies utilizing multiple technologies in ways we’d never seen previously.
