The ongoing multi-day event, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) by the Consumer Technology Association in Las Vegas has been the talk of the town this week with the unveiling of the latest technology and gadgets from different fields such as personal tech, healthcare, kitchen, and sustainability. We look at some of the interesting health tech that was launched at the event.
When it comes to health tech design, women are often an afterthought. If products have to be made for women, there is a common technique, ‘shrink it and pink it’, instead of designing something that considers women’s issues, and issues. At the CES 2024, health solutions company Movaco proved they were outliers by introducing the Evie smart ring. It is a rare woman-first wearable that goes beyond providing a period tracker. The ring’s design is based on data collected from 1,000 women between the ages of 30 and 75 who were asked what was important to them about their needs and desires when it came to wearables and digital wellness, Evie ring’s blog post explains.
Their research found that women want wearables that are more accurate, personalised, and easier to wear. They also want the wearables to provide more than metric tracking to help them better understand their overall health. Evie ring has been designed considering this data.
For instance, it claims to be the first smart ring that is designed with a small gap in the ring surface to accommodate daily changes in finger size caused by hormonal changes and other variables, to ensure that it’s a comfortable fit at all times. Along with monitoring menstrual cycle, mood, and sleep, it also uses highly sensitive medical-grade sensors to optimise vital sign measurement on women's fingers, which tend to be smaller and have less blood flow than men's, PR Newswire reported.
It also uses data from newer studies that consider women-specific factors such as hormonal changes to combine it with custom artificial intelligence technology to find relationships between menstrual health, mood, energy, sleep, and activity.
The new urinary tract infection (UTI) test simplifies the process of detection by removing lab testing from the picture. Health wellness app, Vivoo, has unveiled its at-home UTI test product that can tell a user if they have a UTI within two minutes.
The test has a simple procedure wherein the user has to urinate on a strip and use Vivoo’s app to scan the results. According to Vivoo, its new UTI test gives accurate results, saves customers time, ensures there is no confusion in readings, and digitalises the data, which customers can share with healthcare providers through the app.
It’s a healthcare product that enables people to have more control over their health and makes diagnosis more accessible. The UTI test follows Vivoo’s launch of its ‘smart toilet’ at CES 2023, which focused on the early detection of health conditions.
Boston-based GyroGear, a medical tech startup, introduced a hand-stabilising glove at CES 2024 to help people with Parkinson’s (a condition that causes uncontrollable movements) regain control of their lives. The main part of the GyroGlove is an attached gyroscope about the size of a hockey puck but with a disk inside that spins faster than a jet engine turbine, founder Dr. Faii Ong told AFP.
“That glove is made in the same factory that makes your MacBook Pros,” Ong added in the press statement, referring to Foxconn being a supplier for Apple.
A Canadian woman, Roberta Wilson-Garrett, with Parkinson’s shared her experience of using the GyroGolve, calling it “life-changing” and describing how it stopped tremors that make seemingly simple tasks like getting dressed a challenge.
The company plans to make the gyroscope smaller. "We want to bring the focus away from the disease and back onto the fact that this is human life we are talking about," Ong said in the statement.
