Since I go to so many connected health related conferences, seeing the latest in connected health at HIMSS is not really a huge deal. In most cases, I’ve already seen it somewhere else in a less hectic environment. With that said, I thought I’d see a real explosion of these devices at the conference. Certainly, there were many there, but I didn’t see the explosion that I had expected.
While there was a concentration of them in the Connected Health area, most of the rest of the show floor didn’t have many that I noticed. No doubt we each have our own unique experience at a 40,000 person and 1200 exhibitor conference. So, I’d be interested in hearing what other people’s experiences were at the event.
Even though I didn’t see an explosion of connected health devices (In fact, I may have seen fewer!), I do think that the devices that were being demonstrated are going a lot deeper and doing much more than previous years. That’s a good thing because these devices need to be medical relevant for the healthcare establishment to really care about them.
One example was a demo I saw at the DellEMC booth. They had an incredible dashboard of data that was pulling in a number of different health devices. One tracking pill that you swallow was particularly intriguing. The pill showed that the guy demoing the software had been pretty stressed that morning when the demo wasn’t working quite right. Luckily when I was there he was doing better.
Another feature of these connected health devices that hit me was how far they could reach. At the same demo with DellEMC, they had devices that could be tracked for nearly the entire HIMSS Exhibit hall (All of the Orlando Convention Center). While that’s not needed for home applications where wifi is basically ubiquitous, this is a very valuable tool to connect devices in a hospital setting.
As I mentioned, I hadn’t seen many new things, but we’re seeing the natural evolution of these connected health devices. They haven’t really broken out at HIMSS, but they are definitely getting more mature and that’s a good thing.
