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• Transcript

  James Kotecki (00:07): 

  This is CES Tech Talk. I'm James Kotecki, bringing you a media roundtable conversation on digital health captured live at CES 2025. We brought together some of the brightest media minds for this conversation, and we're bringing it to you right now. 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (00:23): 

  All right. Hello, everybody. For those of you who are here five minutes ago, I'm back with another panel session. Thank you all for joining us for the digital health media panel. I have with me three lovely journalists who have come to cover the show in the digital health vertical specifically. If we could just go down the line, introduce ourselves, tell us how many years you've been covering CES and a little bit about your topics of coverage? 

  Cassie McGrath (00:45): 

  Hey, everyone. My name is Cassie McGrath. I'm a reporter with Healthcare Brew. We're a professional division under Morning Brew. And I always like to say you might know us from our workplace TikToks, but I cover everything from hospitals to health plans to tech. This is my first year at CES, but I've been covering healthcare for a few years. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks, everyone. 

  Logan Plaster (01:06): 

  Hey. I'm Logan Plaster. I'm the head of content at Startup Health. It's also my first year at CES. I write about guests, healthcare startups and kind of tracking the big moonshot trends. We go for the big goals and see who's shooting for the moon in health tech particularly down in the startup zone. And I've been covering healthcare for about 19 years, but, again, first time at CES. 

  James Stables (01:33): 

  Hi. I'm James Stables. I'm the founder of wearable.com. We've been doing, what, it's like 10 CES, I think, or maybe not, maybe I've missed a pandemic one. But we cover the wearables industry. We've been doing that for 10 years and, recently, sort of come out of direct consumer stuff and talking about consumer digital health as wearables have become more complex and ecosystems are growing. And we do a very cool newsletter everyone should sign up for called PULSE by Wareable, which is a substack on digital health and wearables. 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (02:06): 

  Thank you. Okay. Well, welcome and welcome back. So, this year, digital health has been one of our key themes at the show. You guys know that. Well, you know in particular, James, that health has moved from North Hall to the Venetian. We have a digital health summit. It's really blown up. AARP is here with their AgeTech Collaborative. And we're just seeing these health and accessibility innovations just bigger and better than ever, so I want to know what are the most promising trends that you've seen in digital health so far at the show? 

  Cassie McGrath (02:37): 

  Yeah, I can get started on that one. I've noticed a specific trend towards sleep at the show this year, and I personally think that that's going to be one of the up and coming trends in healthcare. Definitely, as you mentioned, the aging population is growing exponentially, as well as meeting shortages and staff and providers and otherwise, so a lot of innovations for staffing, for meeting the aging population. I saw a smart diaper that can report when patients need a change to help cut down on the times, things like that that I think are really exciting and can potentially really make a difference in patient care for the people who need it most. 

  Logan Plaster (03:22): 

  We are at an incredibly exciting moment in neurotech, and we saw that on the floor. Partially, I'm looking for it because we launched this Alzheimer's moonshot and have been writing a lot about neurotech, but there is so much happening in terms of understanding brain signals using AI to interpret brain signals in new ways, using infrared light to treat neurodegenerative diseases, infrared light, radio signals, electrical stimulation. We are in, literally, a one-to-two year flywheel moment with neurotech, and you could see it down in Eureka Park and on the main floor. 

  James Stables (04:07): 

  Yeah, I went to a really cool digital health track on neurotech. It was really cool On the consumer side, these sorts of dumb wearables we've had for 10 years are actually getting really good now, so people are getting in tune with their data and health in a meaningful way. Obviously, AI is helping that, and it's sort of helping to make sense of data. Companies like Oura are doing really great stuff with slicing and dicing data and making it meaningful at long last. We've been talking about that for 10 years, and now it's actually happening, some really cool biowearables, biosensors, which I'll probably end up banging on about in a minute like Dexcom. And Dexcom and Oura teaming up as Abbot, Lingo by Abbot, and some pretty cool sensors for tracking signs of perimenopause and a very cool hormone meter. Have you seen that? 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (05:00): 

  The hormometer? 

  James Stables (05:01): 

  Yeah. Yeah. I asked them if it was hormometer, but they went hormometer, which I didn't think tracked that well. But, anyway, yeah, good stuff everywhere. 

  Cassie McGrath (05:10): 

  If I can just add on, the wearables biosensors component, at a panel earlier, an executive from Eli Lilly was talking about how patients often report the side effects they experience with medications, and that wearables in the future may be used to detect that on behalf of patients and can report that data back. And, personally, I'll be really interested to see how wearables will roll into clinical trials as well as things like primary care and stuff like that. 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (05:37): 

  Yeah, I was mentioning earlier anecdotally that last year at Eureka Park in the Dutch Pavilion, there was an exhibitor who had an AI model that would essentially go through patient records and then would be able to essentially assess based on their medical history, their risk of infection after surgery, and that could then inform the patient care and how they monitor that patient post-surgery, so interested to see how that develops, if you guys have any thoughts on that? 

  Logan Plaster (06:05): 

  That plays into just everything like that seems like it has six or seven tendrils that lead back into it. So I know a company working on computer vision looking at the same cut, and so you've got the folks looking at the data to understand, okay, who's going to have a readmission, you have the computer vision guys, and you have this company over here. And so that leads me to issues of collaboration. You see all these folks doing pretty similar things in Eureka Park, and so the big question is how can we get them together, get them talking, get them sharing information? 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (06:38): 

  Yeah. No. Definitely, I think we're in discovery phase as always of how to deploy this technology, and so probably the next phase that they have to look into, as you said, is streamlining the data and the application of the data. 

  Cassie McGrath (06:53): 

  Yeah. And on the note of predicting the outcomes of surgeries, I think everyone at all times is talking about preventative care and healthcare, and so any technologies that can accurately predict if patients will develop a certain condition or maybe catch something sooner. Right now, I've seen so many cool technologies just tracking glucose levels and helping patients with diabetes and things like that. Because we know that cardio metabolic diseases are a huge burden on people and healthcare system, but, more importantly people, so I think anything that can really help keep people out of the hospital in the first place and the technologies that are making a difference there I think are really exciting. 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (07:40): 

  Yeah, and I do, I guess I want to follow that up with we were discussing a little bit earlier about there is a bit of a healthcare worker shortage and the supply is not necessarily increasing at the rate that the demand requires, so how do we think technologies that you may be seeing at the show will be able in the future to help meet that demand or close that gap a little bit? 

  Logan Plaster (08:04): 

  A big issue there is dealing with the mountains of data that are being thrown at providers, and so health systems need to take it really seriously. There's not a silver bullet for fixing that problem. They need to put the provider's mental health as a top priority and figure out how to invest in alert fatigue, computer fatigue and just prioritize that part of the patient encounter. 

  Cassie McGrath (08:34): 

  Yeah, I have a monthly newsletter that I write called AI 411, little plug. And, every month, the biggest or the highest rate of announcements I always see are AI scribes that take notes on behalf of clinicians. Some of you may be using them, but I think it's kind of right now an intersection between implementation of these new technologies and adoption, if clinicians are using these yet, if they're finding them helpful, where they could possibly improve. But I think that could potentially help in shortages because we all know how documentation burnout is a real problem and, right now, there's promise that that could give a lot more time back to face-to-face interactions with patients. 

  James Stables (09:26): 

  Yeah, I think, coming back to what you said earlier, Cassie, if anything links, you guys are more in the sort of pure healthcare field, I want to say. In the consumer tech field, it's something that unifies everything you see at CES. We've got to keep people out of hospital. As you say, there's care problems, there's physician problems, there's staffing problems, there's budgetary problems. In the UK, our health service is constantly a topic of news about being stretched to breaking point every winter. 

  (09:52): 

  We've got to keep people away out of chronic disease. And biowearables like Lingo and Stelo, the Dexcom one, like glucose, spiking glucose level is hugely linked to chronic disease, if we can catch, help people stay healthier and stay on top of that in their 50s and 60, they're not going to be in hospitals with a chronic disease in their 70s, 80s. And then, if people do make it into hospitals, at least using wearables to make sure they can be cared for at home, remote patient monitoring, putting them in touch with their doctors, and the hormometer, people doing IVF coming into clinics every day to get their levels tested so they can have a successful run at their... It's not just for their IVF. That's a burden on them and their jobs for doing an IVF cycle. It's a lot of money as well, but it's also those waiting times will be massive because people are just constantly going in to get tested. 

  (10:49): 

  The hormometer is a saliva solution, so they just pop the sensor in the mouth and it can tell you what the levels are. So you can just do all that at home and show up at the clinic on the right day. All of these things come together to be less burden on the health service, how can we create better healthcare experiences and better outcomes and a better future. 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (11:08): 

  I love that. That's an amazing story. 

  Cassie McGrath (11:10): 

  Just one more to add, too, some of you may have seen one medical on the exhibition floor at the Venetian, and they're advertising like a clinic-in-a-box that's been implemented in the Texas prison system and in homeless shelters and rural areas where patients often don't have access to care and, of course, need it and deserve it. And I'll be interested to see how technologies like this can provide more access to primary care amid shortages and otherwise. 

  Logan Plaster (11:40): 

  That was fascinating to me because there have been multiple other clinic-in-a-box technologies attempted and they didn't work, so I had a chance to talk to those folks as well. And sometimes it's little tweaks within the technology that makes it different. They made the physician full-size and you could have eye contact with your physician, and so interesting to me how, each generation, they sort of figure out these elements like, "What was holding us back from really connecting with our doctor over telemedicine?" Maybe it's this element of seeing them in the flesh. 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (12:15): 

  And that's a little bit of the scientific method at work which is what we love to see at CES, trial and error and then improvements. So we have discussed already in terms of vital monitoring, et cetera, a lot of preventative care solutions. Now, I wanted to turn a little bit to accessibility with chronic conditions. A lot of the technology we've seen at the show floor, whether Eureka Park or in the AgeTech Pavilion, is able to help those with audiovisual disabilities or the aging population just live more comfortable lives. 

  (12:46): 

  I saw actually at Eureka Park this morning a really cool exhibitor called .lumen that was a bit of, I guess, like we said, the evolution of a wearable in the Swiss Pavilion last year wherein they had haptic feedback glasses that would just give you haptic feedback on obstacles in your path, so in front to the left or the right of you. This one is I guess the next phase of that, an evolution of that technology wherein the wearable is again on the head, except it integrates with Google Maps so it gives you haptic lead feedback. So it is directional, and I thought that was a really, really cool development for the visually impaired. Yeah. 

  Logan Plaster (13:26): 

  I was loving Essilor right at the entrance. Everyone saw Essilor, beautiful glasses that were for hearing augmentation and, as you turn your head, it mutes sounds from the sides and the back and it focuses your hearing in front of you. But what really I found interesting in terms of accessibility was the idea of pushing back against the stigma of hearing aids by making the glasses beautiful. And I think that was an interesting trend I saw was a few places really thinking about the aesthetics of a health tech device and saying, "Yeah, this is part of what you do. If someone doesn't really want to incorporate it into their daily life, they're not going to use it." 

  James Stables (14:08): 

  Yeah. I think what's interesting about that, and it plays into not something from the show, but Apple's big breakthroughs this year with AirPods. It's not really about people with massive amounts of hearing loss that would go to their doctor and then go to an audiologist and get a proper in-ear hearing aid. Those people would still probably use that. It's like the millions and millions and millions of other people who just kind of suffer a less good life because their hearing isn't very good. And not being able to hear properly is linked to really, really poor outcomes in terms of dementia and social isolation, so it's not really about these, as we talk about a lot about digital health products and healthcare, it's about the people who really, really need that. It's about those millions of people who have sort of lesser, but no less important needs. 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (14:56): 

  Following up on both of those really quick, I love that you brought up both of those examples because, for those of you who don't know, the producer of CES, we're the Consumer Technology Association. In our association work, we do a lot of advocacy work and we also develop standards, so preventative care in the hearing space. We developed a hearing number standard to be able to measure your hearing health in the past year that was published. And John Luna of EssilorLuxottica was also in our digital health working group that did a lot of the advocacy to get FDA approval for over-the-counter hearing aids. So that was also something we're really proud of having gotten done in the past couple of years wherein, again, previously, those with hearing loss who needed hearing aids would have to go into the doctor, get a prescription, and the devices that were approved for that type of care were going for several thousand dollars. And getting that FDA approval for over-the-counter hearing aids was able to get people that quality at a price point of a couple of hundred. 

  James Stables (15:56): 

  If you want an interesting little nugget of information, Apple hasn't launched their hearing aid feature in the UK because there's no provision for over-the-counter hearing aids on sort of a governmental level. That just shows that there's a lot of work globally to get those features out. 

  Cassie McGrath (16:14): 

  Yeah. I think, in addition to what I was saying about sleep, I was sort of walking around the conference taking a tally of trends, and hearing and vision aids were definitely something I was seeing. I got to try the glasses on earlier today. But, in addition to hearing and vision, also physical mobility supports, and one company that came to mind is Cosmo Robotics. And I walked by, and they have exoskeletons helping children with cerebral palsy and other conditions, as well as adults. And I'm really excited in particular about the technology's ability to help people move and walk, so I think anything that can really... I mean, these technologies really are opening doors that previously there wasn't really an option for patients, so I think that's pretty cool. 

  Logan Plaster (17:08): 

  And the price point for the exoskeletons has gone down. I saw one that was around $300. They were trying to be the most consumer-friendly exoskeleton. 

  Cassie McGrath (17:16): 

  I'm glad you mentioned that, too, because in healthcare, what we always talk about is the affordability component, and so that can't be forgotten, when we create new things, we also need to make sure they're accessible, of course. 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (17:26): 

  Yeah, and especially with accessibility, being accessible in terms of not being cost prohibitive. That's something that we love to see at the show because the more these technologies develop, the more they become easier to replicate and then produce at scale. Thank you guys. So I also will do one final plug that EssilorLuxottica, for those don't know, I just did want to say on the point of them dealing with aesthetics and kind of helping to circumvent the stigma of wearables, et cetera, by being kind of a stylish glasses wearable, EssilorLuxottica is the owner of Ray-Ban, so they, they're going to look nice, for those who don't know. But, yeah, I love that company. Actually, they were here at the show last year, and they were in one of my power sessions at Mandalay Bay during media days, so that was the conference that they used to launch their show. 

  (18:20): 

  And beyond that, I think AgeTech also, we've talked about hearing disabilities, mobility, disabilities, visual disabilities, but the aging population then having chronic care needs, I think the AgeTech Collaborative has a lot to show us. And I know Logan mentioned that he's been there, so if you can give us the highlights? 

  Logan Plaster (18:39): 

  Yeah. We have a number of companies in Startup Health. We work with about 500 companies from 30 countries, and so a few of them were in the AgeTech Collaborative. One deals with using your camera smartphone to get biometrics from your face based off of blood flow, so just making it highly accessible to do a daily sort of reading which gets sent to your doctor. 

  (19:02): 

  But I think what gets me more excited, I love it when something really innovative actually ends up being low-tech and hyper accessible. And there was a company in the AgeTech Collaborative called Zinnia that does therapeutic TV. And they worked with a designer at Apple, and they create this beautiful content that is scientifically dialed for folks with dementia to help them bring their blood pressure down. And it's actually gotten to the point where you can prescribe a show for somebody who's having an episode instead of giving them an anti-psychotic. And they're doing this in the hospital, and so it seems simple, slow TV, but it's actually beautifully innovative. 

  Cassie McGrath (19:48): 

  Just to add one thing there, I think amongst the trends we're seeing, I think the aging population and home health kind of go hand-in-hand. And I saw one radar that could detect if a patient had fallen in their home or perhaps hadn't gone out of bed without it being a camera for privacy reasons. And I think, as we look at the aging population and people being able to stay in their own homes to get the care that they need and home hospital growing at a rapid rate around the country, I think a lot of this technology might be put into place sooner than later. 

  Grace Venes-Escaffi (20:23): 

  Yeah, and we're really excited to see that here at the show. Now, we've come up on time, so I just want to say thank you all for being up here with me, and thank you all for joining us in the audience. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week here at CES. Let's give it up for our media panelists. Thank you. 

  James Kotecki (20:40): 

  Well, I hope you enjoyed that roundtable from CES 2025. That's our show for now, but there's always more tech to talk about. Look out for other media roundtable conversations on policy and advanced mobility. And please help us give the algorithms what they want. If you're on YouTube, please subscribe and leave a comment. If you're listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartMedia or wherever you get your podcasts, hit that follow button. You can get even more CES at ces.tech. That's C-E-S.T-E-C-H. 

  (21:09): 

  Our show is produced by Nicole Vidovich and Paige Morris and edited by Third Spoon. I'm James Kotecki, talking tech on CES Tech Talk.