Tech is building a better you

● Futuristic drones, autonomous cars and giant TVs may have dominated the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, but the real star of the show was the human body.

The annual show, which sprawls across convention centres, featured two areas dedicated to the human body theme, the health and wellness display and the fitness and technology area. Both the expected exhibitors such as Fitbit and Philips, and the unexpected such as IBM and Nokia Health technologies, featured innovations ranging from brain scanning to baby tech.

CES even featured a “disruptive innovations in healthcare” conference stream. It was attended not by computer geeks, but by physicians, health insurers and hospital executives — emphasising the business end of new health gadgets.

Surprisingly, given the profit orientation of these industries, one of the themes was “the impact of digital therapeutics on limiting the use of pharmaceuticals”. Digital therapeutics are defined by the Consumer Technology Association, the organiser of CES, as “technology that can improve a person’s health equal to a drug, but without the same costs and side-effects”.

The health technology on display ranged from the cradle to the grave.

A Baby-Tech Summit featured an award for the best innovation. Winners included a smart bottle that analyses a baby’s intake, a smartphone-synched car seat that alerts parents to unsafe situations, and a Bluetooth monitor that transmits body temperature to a smartphone.

The audience favourite was an undermattress fertility tracker that accurately pinpoints a woman’s fertility window.