• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, January 5, 2023

Image above: Evie, a smart ring for women that provides a host of medical info about the wearer.

The “consumerization of healthcare” is a big buzz phrase in medical circles these days, so what better place to display the latest industry trends than at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which starts today in Las Vegas?

Checking out the info about new products (most not available yet, and some without FDA approval) on exhibit at the event’s Health & Wellness Hall, a few trends emerge:

Home testing keeps growing

This key element of consumers taking control of their own health care has boomed over the past couple of years, thanks to COVID self tests.

But if you hate sticking those swabs up your nostrils, how about a totally electronic test that not only covers COVID, but also the other culprits in the current “tripledemic”: flu and RSV?

If your answer is “yes,” help is on the way in the form of ViraWarn, a multiuse, rechargeable breath analyzer from Opteev Technologies. You turn it on, blow twice into the mouthpiece, and a notification light gives you results in under 60 seconds.

What about home blood testing? SiPhox Health is previewing a platform that it says “requires less than a drop of blood, delivers results in under five minutes” -- and, perhaps most importantly for anyone familiar with the Theranos failure -- “has been externally validated against traditional central lab methods.” ” The "technology seems to deliver on at least some of the promises Theranos made," according to a post on Neo Life, which covers neobiological stories.

Or maybe you hate having to pee into a cup once a year at the doctor’s office?

Soon, you could test your own urine daily by just peeing into your own toilet bowl. 

Withings’ U-Scan, said to be “the world's first hands-free connected home urine lab,” works like this: put the device inside your bowl and it syncs to an app, which can then provide actionable insights. The product uses changeable cartridges that assess specific biomarkers. For example, U-Scan is launching first in Europe with cartridges for tracking of women's monthly cycles and hydration/nutrition.

People must be having a lot of trouble sleeping these days...

Because sleep aid products appear very, very popular.

Let’s keep on the contactless theme with a sleep monitoring system that doesn’t require anything to touch you, inside or out.

Hecaray Nelf’ Sleep Tracking Monitor and App is said to record a whole night's sleep, detect sleep stages, and analyze both obstructive sleep apnea and heart rate variability.  The product then uses the monitored data to help improve sleep quality with white noise that enhances sleep, and lights that  “control how much melatonin people produce at night and dawn.”

Another bed company, ErgoSportive, has teamed with Garmin smartwatches to provide a smart bed that measures sleep stages, movement, heart and respiration rate, which integrates with smartwatch features like energy monitoring, stress tracking and measurement of daytime calories burned

That smart bed/smartwatch team-up lands on the crux of a third CES theme:

Wearables are evolving

Movano Health is exhibiting Evie, a smart ring for women that, if cleared by the FDA, would be the “first consumer wearable that’s also a medical device,” the company claims. It measures such health stats as resting heart rate, heart rate variability, oxygen saturation, respiration rate, skin temperature variability, period and ovulation tracking, menstrual symptom tracking, and sleep stages/duration.

Or how about a smartwatch that seems to do everything but tell time? NoWatch, developed in partnership with Phillips, is a screenless device that “provides real-time feedback about movement, sleep and stress, alongside recovery tools to restore balance and help users to live more fully in the ‘now.’”