Today’s wearables are still designed for the healthy and wealthy, not those who could benefit the most. Medical wearables offer the potential to collect health data and improve health via a combination of real-time AI and expert human intervention. Apple’s announcement of FDA clearance of its Watch for screening for irregular heart rhythms was meant to be groundbreaking. But its medical value right now remains limited and controversial. What will make the promise into reality?
I believe the application that will make wearables medically matter is automated blood pressure monitoring. Blood pressure may not be sexy, but it’s a universally understood measurement and a clinically central one. Your doctor measures your blood pressure every single time you visit. Even those who don’t pay close attention to their health know that high blood pressure increases risk of heart attack and stroke, and lower blood pressure saves lives.
High blood pressure, or hypertension, affects between 30-50% of adult Americans, or 75-120 million people. It’s the No. 1 risk factor in deaths worldwide, and the No. 1 modifiable risk in heart disease and stroke, the top two worldwide causes of death. Despite this, only half of people with high blood pressure are lowering it enough, even with medications. Why? A big reason is lack of information.
Doctors advise everyone at risk to monitor their blood pressure, but few do it often enough, in large part because inflatable blood pressure cuffs, while universal, are uncomfortable and inconvenient. In fact, current medical guidelines recommend automated blood pressure monitoring to more accurately measure your blood pressure, but hardly anyone is willing to use a motorized cuff that squeezes your arm every 30 minutes while you try to sleep! Cuffless automated monitoring would provide more accurate information, enable timely intervention, lower blood pressure and save lives.
Numerous companies have tried to create a cuffless automated blood pressure monitor, including Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Fitbit and Jawbone, as well as a very long list of startups. No one has yet been successful. As a healthcare investor excited about this area, I have met with many of the startups working on this problem, and I see some common issues.
Companies in this area should first focus on generating medical-quality data. Teams need experts in FDA regulation and clinical studies and need to listen to them when planning timelines and budgets. Unlike some other areas where VCs invest, this is not a market for moving fast and breaking things. Instead, companies need to collect training data from hundreds of people, especially those with hypertension, to ensure their product meets the FDA’s performance standards.
We can make wearables matter.
But accurate data is just the tip of the iceberg. More complete blood pressure data should enable healthier decisions and lower blood pressures. This could mean a warning that average blood pressure has increased recently, or a proactive text or call from your doctor or a family member. It could include suggested adjustments to medications or healthier behaviors based on patterns through the day and night. User experience plays a critical role in real-world use. Automated monitoring should be no more intrusive than wearing a wristwatch and getting a notification.
The good news is a breakthrough in this space doesn’t seem that far away. Better sensors, algorithms, computing power and battery life are helping companies produce results closer to FDA standards. I expect multiple groups will meet the challenge in the next 18 months. Room exists for multiple winners in this market, given the huge market opportunity and wide range of use cases. Every major wearable platform is under pressure to consider adding FDA-cleared applications, and blood pressure is at or near the top of their “most wantedâ€� lists.
Companies that can connect better data to better blood pressure will be able to create value and win payment from insurers, consumers or both. For example, Medicare has recently significantly improved coverage of remote patient monitoring.
Cuffless automated blood pressure monitoring will improve how we treat high blood pressure, both through medication and healthy behaviors. Automated monitoring will better support people at highest risk, such as patients recovering from heart failure or stroke, by providing early warnings of potential recurrence. Ultimately, we could even get early warnings of heart attacks, strokes or other events, giving us time to act.
Current wearables measure what comes easily, like steps and heart rate. By instead measuring what matters medically, we can use that data to extend lives. We can make wearables matter.
Source: TechCrunch
David Fincher will be directing his first feature film since 2014, and he’s making it for Netflix .
The director of “Seven” and “The Social Network” already helped kick off Netflix’s original content boom by directing episodes of “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter.” In fact, the popularity of Fincher’s films on Netflix was famously one of the reasons the streamer’s executives felt comfortable spending hundreds of millions of dollars on “House of Cards.”
As reported in Variety, Fincher’s new film is currently titled “Mank.” It will be a biopic starring Gary Oldman as screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who shared credit (and the film’s only Academy Award) with director Orson Welles for writing “Citizen Kane.”
While it’s not clear what stance the film will take toward Mankiewicz and Welles, it’s worth noting that some cinephiles (including the critic Pauline Kael) have argued that Mankiewicz deserves more credit for the greatness of “Kane,” which is commonly described as the greatest movie of all time.
This sounds like a passion project for Fincher, particularly since the initial script was written years ago by his father Jack, who died in 2003.
It’s also a vein of film history that Netflix tapped last year by financing the completion of Welles’ final film, “The Other Side of the Wind.”
Source: TechCrunch
With over-the-top (OTT) changing the way we consume entertainment across devices, most of the media attention is going to the big players trying to elbow their way into the streaming space with big new subscription services and original programming. Less discussed is the suite of technologies that pave the way for those services to connect to their audience and monetize the content.
Okay, it’s true video compression, identity management, analytics, front-end personalization and device-specific experience optimization are not the sexiest topics in the media world. But without those core features and functions, the OTT revolution would be dead in its tracks. And with the big providers focused on content development, user acquisition and business model optimization, development of those technologies is wide open for innovative startups.
As always, entrepreneurs should look for cracks and gaps in the existing processes to find better solutions. Right now, the biggest systemic pains in the emerging OTT ecosystem are around the complexity of the fragmented user experience – having to sign in and out of multiple systems to get to the content we want to watch – and around adapting old mass-audience advertising models to the new era of multi-device, multi-platform, personalized viewing.
Here are three areas where small, nimble startups could make a real contribution to the industry.
Enabling the Evolving Advertising Model
Currently the streaming market is divided between ad-supported services and premium-fee subscription models, but that hard division is unlikely to survive the next wave of market disruption. Premium services like Netflix will need to introduce a lower-fee ad-based tier to expand their audience and compete with lower-priced offerings like Disney+. More fundamentally, streamers will need additional sources of revenue once they have harvested all the low-hanging fruit in terms of subscriber base growth. And because streamers have access to so much user-specific data, the potential for personalized advertising is vast.
Online ad-tech platforms are already scrambling to retool their marketplaces to serve streamers. Is that the right way to look at the new OTT ecosystem, or does the way we sell, serve and measure ads for streaming services need to evolve to address audiences binge-watching longform content rather than snacking on short-form listicles, GIFs and short videos?
There’s also a blue sky opportunity to monitor and measure the performance of interactive ads that provide click-through transactions for viewers watching on tablets or handheld devices. Early data shows these ads can be extremely effective… or they can be so annoying and intrusive that they risk alienating viewers entirely. Do we trust the big companies to get this balance right? Sounds to me like this is a job for small, focused, innovative startups with a single-minded devotion to solving one facet of this problem for the industry.
Reducing Platform Friction
One byproduct of the fragmentation of the old bundled cable viewing experience is the demise of the relatively simply program grid. What we found in the 00’s is that, even with 500+ channels available through some cable systems, you can make that simple and consumable for viewers if you present it intuitively and augment it with a little bit of intelligence.
Now that we’re entering a world which each content provider requires membership in its private OTT service to access original content plus its archive of movies and shows, it’s no longer so simple. In fact, there’s a lot of friction and overhead between the user and their shows.
We see a huge opportunity for startups to address this by creating a meta-layer on top of the fragmented streaming environment that abstracts away the complexity for viewers while preserving the underlying integrity of the individual services. This layer would act like a web browser, passing user access credentials seamlessly to each site to simplify sign in, standardizing the presentation of content and ads, and securely passing user data to each back end system.
The big players have invested specifically in making these platforms closed and proprietary to maximize their own competitive advantage. You can’t count on them to fix a situation that they perceive as being in their individual interests, even if it ends up hurting the industry and the ecosystem as a whole. But there’s a great opportunity for an outside innovator to come in and disrupt this model before it ossifies into a near-monopoly situation for a few carriers.
Telephone switchboard operators circa 1914. Photo courtesy Flickr and reynermedia.
Personalizing Content
The third big opportunity also addresses this big consumer pain point of complexity, specifically around having too many content choices and no road map for finding the programs we want to see. Once again, this is a problem we were able to solve in the old bunded cable era with smart collaborative filtering technologies, recommendations, and automation that allowed people to essentially build their own personalized content channels featuring stuff they already liked and might possibly like.
Fragmentation of content across closed services makes that more challenging. Luckily, AI capabilities have evolved as well, to the point that we don’t need to think only in terms of personalizing viewing options, but personalizing the entire viewing experience.
Again, business incentives dictate that each OTT service develop its own UX to differentiate itself from competitors, but those incentives work against the desires of viewers to have a simple way to find and view content that’s standard across whatever services they use. There’s a great opportunity for startups to bring forward all that we’ve learned about UX design, customization and personalization, plus a layer of AI to simplify search and discovery of content users prefer, to make the whole streaming world much simpler.
Open Innovation Starts with IP
These are just a few examples of areas where disruptive innovators can fix problems that the industry leaders can’t or won’t. We believe that an open model for innovation needs to be part of the conversation around the future of entertainment, and that conversation must include small insurgent companies as well as the giant incumbents. But for that model to work, we need to ensure that the IP rights of those companies are protected and respected.
If we can stick by those principles, we can create a more stable foundation for the post-cable world of TV entertainment, bring new solutions to market more quickly and more efficiently, and continue to delight audiences with great content rather than frustrating them with complexity and impossible choices.
Source: TechCrunch
Amazon Prime Day is just around the corner, and it’s time to start preparing for some amazing laptop deals. Every year, we see huge discounts on gaming laptops, MacBooks, Chromebooks, and more.
Source: Digital trends
If you’re an AMD fan in 2019, there’s only one real choice to make when it comes to graphics cards: Radeon RX 5700 XT vs. RX 5700. There’s $50 between them, but how differently do they perform? Let’s find out.
Source: Digital trends
It’s fair to say Apple’s butterfly keyboard has been a disaster, and a new patent adds to the evidence that Apple is ready to ditch it in favor of the scissor switch. Will it really kill the butterfly switch or just try to improve it?
Source: Digital trends
Software designed by a Carnegie Mellon professor and Facebook researcher beat five human pros in no-limit Texas Hold’em.
Source: Wired
Walmart is dropping amazing deals on thousands of products this Prime Day to keep pace with Amazon, including the Samsung Chromebook 3. Normally $199, you can now get one for only $159 – which saves you $40.
Source: Digital trends
The show will eventually air on the Disney+ streaming service.
Source: Wired
The tech giant wants to position itself as a positive force for US workers, but it’s not clear whether retraining will be effective.
Source: Wired