João Bocas, CEO, Keynote Speaker, Social Media Influencer & Advisor at Digital Salutem, sat down with me for a wide-ranging discussion on topics related to wearables, AI, machine learning, robotics, and other digital health tools in Pharma and healthcare. We also dived into the concepts of “healthcare influencers” and “digital opinion leaders,” among many other things!
Here is a sneak peek of our conversation:
Q: Tell us a little bit about the second-generation biological sensors located in things like clothing and patches. What is that going to do in helping us with long-term and sustainable monitoring of patients?
A: Certainly, it is a development in technological means, if you like, because the technology becomes more advanced and this also gives us an option. Not everybody wants to wear a smartwatch or fitness tracker, so they may use a wearable in a different shape or form.
We talk about smart patches; these actually have a lot of benefits because they’re light, they go on a certain part of the body, but also the majority of them actually don’t have a long-term battery span. They may have 5, 7, or 10 days maximum, so there is certainly an issue there. We’ve seen things such as smart pills and we’re seeing, as you mentioned, sensors in clothing. We’re even now seeing “hearables” like AirPods, having some kind of health sensor capabilities, like getting blood pressure monitoring from your ear canal and getting your health data from there, because we have the sensing capabilities. It’s an American company doing some great work there.
We have a couple of options, but with that, I think if you give the patient the choice, probably people would choose different things, and things will become a bit more fragmented. Things are evolving very fast and are becoming a bit more reliable in terms of technology. In the beginning, we were seeing all these wearables coming out, but their reliability has also been an issue.
Even though there is no specific benchmark and the industry doesn’t have a benchmark for wearables, for example, or a clear pathway, I think we are entering a very exciting few years because things are happening. Everybody is moving along with it, which is good. I think we’ve seen a lot of adoption lately. I personally have been talking to a lot of healthcare organizations that are considering creating [these types of] solutions, and things are becoming a bit more sophisticated, so good news…
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with João Bocas, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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