07/ago/2014

Market is made by individuals, big changes in market and new trend are ignited by changes within the individual perception of needs or simply by the availability of new technologies that allow to express latent needs.

Personal Health is one of the key needs of any individual regardless of culture and geography, the needs of healthy life spread across different industry ranging from Food to fitness and of course pharma.

Historically needs for monitoring and control of personal health parameters has been covered by services delivered by medical institutions as well as the introduction on the market of some semi-pro tools and devices for example blood pressure and heart rate, in addition a continuous trend of health information has been emerged in the past via consumer publications and within the last decade the massive use of Internet to deliver medical information.

In these days we may be at the sunset of a new era for personal health monitoring, major player in the smartphone arena are actively researching and planning the introduction of health control and monitoring tools embedded into their handset, this in an effort to differentiate and to boost the penetration of universal personal devices on any market close to the consumer.

In September 2014 Apple© will release a new app on the iPhone(TM) handheld ( named Heath Book ) that will allow to record a set of parameters like physical

exercise, info over drugs; the platform will also provide a set of driver and tools to connect to external or wearable devices to log blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels and similar. Similar efforts are ongoing on by other vendors too ranging from hardware to software players ( i.e. over Android platform) and these combined efforts together with the market growing demand will presumably quickly lead to the evolution of an “ecosystem” targeting the end user with a set of devices and tools to cover health and good health practice.

It could be expected, by analysing what happened in the past in similar market segment for personal devices, that in a 12\18 month time the market will boost this trend and generate critical mass, question is what will happen after the first wage of early adopters, I believe that after that pionering phase the market will start segmenting between consumer, prosumer and traditional medical professional tools and services.

The technology impact will for sure spread across all the segments but the consume one will be the fastest and the one with the higher degree of innovation, while on the prosumer and professional segment new tools will “simply” add technology to an existing market, in the consumer segment this technologies will generate and create a brand new market for devices, tools and ultimately services associated.

At the beginning focus will be on the hardware, sensors and devices, following that wage the focus will start shifting over software and app on the handheld to monitor, log and access via smart user interface the data, and finally after a while the needs to interpret these data set as well and the need for knowledge will ignite needs for back office services and back office tool to manage this data into medical process and procedures.

The amount of data to monitor record store will be at that phase significant, similar to what happen to retailers when barcode scanner were introduced decades ago, the need will start on infrastructure than will shift on system to cluster data and finally on tools to perform analysis.

Heath and Medical industry will beed to be equipped to manage this changes in a different manner, this change will introduce large competition as well as needs for information technology skills and experience.
The ability to sit into costumer smartphone will also be a phenomenal tools to perform one to one communication and to move to a more close and efficient level the relationship with the consumer.

Playing in this new area will be a key needs for traditional health player and will open space for newcomers, speed will be also a key factor since that arena will be at high level of innovation and could benefit for cross sharing of knowledge from others business, the most effective manner will to create multidisciplinary team to scope

spec and design solution and roadmaps in the future.

Massimo Antoniello
Innovation Consultant

Categories: Economy

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *