TECHNOLOGY MAKERS TRY FOR UTILITARIAN WARES
fashion-forward or discreet but has an alluring promise: weight loss. Chief Executive Jason Mckeown said the health industry especially had taken note of how wearables could provide less invasive treatment options.
Mckeown said the headset tackled a core issue of weight loss — that metabolism and appetite are controlled by the brain — by connecting to the back of peoples’ ears and using electrical stimulation to activate the hypothalamus to regulate body fat. People can track their progress on weight changes, body fat reduction, BMI and waist size on an accompanying app.
He said he wanted the next iteration of the product to be smaller, more refined and with added app features.
“The goal is to become more and more compact,” Mckeown said. “Even the next generation of the Fitbit and Apple Watch have more elements to it. The more technology gets smaller, the more people will engage.”
Long-term engagement is indeed key to a wearable’s success. With its Apple Watch, Apple last year became the world’s top wearables company, toppling Fitbit. Part of the smartwatch’s dominance can be attributed to its wide array of functions: Besides fitness tracking, wearers use their Apple Watches to read emails, send text messages, make calls from their wrist, listen to music and get directions.
Carlsbad, Calif., medical technology company Oska made its first appearance at CES to promote its pain-reducing wearable device called the Pulse.
The oval gadget about the size of a large smartphone miniaturizes a device typically available only in doctor’s offices.
The makers of the Pulse say it delivers so-called pulse electromagnetic field therapy — a decades-old medical treatment that realigns the electrical field around damaged cells to release toxins and attract nutrients for quicker healing. It can be strapped onto a patient wherever there’s minor or chronic pain, reducing the need for prescription drugs.
Oska’s founder and chief executive, Greg Houlgate, said the Pulse represented the latest application of medical know-how to a portable device for consumers.
“It’s like the fitness trackers that came out at CES a few years ago that measured your heart rate,” Houlgate said. “Ten years ago you’d have to do that in a medical setting. Now it’s available on a wearable device.”
The Pulse is available online for $399. The latest version of the device Oska showcased at CES was paired with a new app for patients to track fluctuations and improvements in their pain.
As wearables become more diverse, tech makers need to create products that not just sound cool but also have lasting utility, Gartner’s Blau said. The firm is predicting the wearables market will grow to 505 million units sold worldwide in 2021, up 63 percent from last year.
“It’s a hard equation for a lot of businesses,” he said. As an example, he pointed to the rise in web-connnected technologies that have inundated everyday consumer products. Although some make sense — such as smart televisions and refrigerators — he questioned whether there was a need for smart toilets and smart tooth floss dispensers.
It’s something L’oreal’s Balooch said the company took into consideration.
Customers are “measuring all kinds of stuff, some things are valuable, some aren’t,” he said. “We wanted to measure something that’s important, that’s actionable, that people care about.”