Wearables and mobile health, what's happening in that space? With me to talk
about that is Robin Duke-Woolley who is the founder and CEO
of Beechem research out of the UK. Robin thank you for being with us here.
Let's talk about the state of play right now just in terms of mobile health
and what are we doing at how and M2M is fitting into that space.
Yeah, well obviously the opportunities for mobile health are very
very large
there's tremendous opportunities to save costs to
improve diagnostics to
how people, basically, recovering at home rather than in a hospital
there's all the opportunities to save capacity and
beds in hospitals and turn those around more quickly
so the opportunities are very strong
but with all new technologies and all new ways of doing things there are
old ways that need to be
converted, there's a need to
mold together the old practices and the new practices
and that takes time
how much of this is the patient, you know I think of
adoption right. I have to learn how to use this thing and if I get this
machine and I'm supposed to hook it up to this and that, have
the information go somewhere else, I might be more likely to say no,
not for me.
well it all depends on the lifestyle and how it affects your
lifestyle I think, if you can see the benefits of using it, if you can
see that it's not too obtrusive then you're more likely to use it, so we do a lot of
work in the wearable technology side for example
and that's looking at how you can make things much more
user-friendly basically, so less obtrusive
less clunky
and something that you'd be prepared to wear most of the time or all of the time
because then it makes it much more effective as a as a monitoring tool
and so we think that wearable technology has a very great part to play
in the roll out to the medical side
for remote diagnostics and things like that.
as it does with others as
Is there a concern about
where my information is going, privacy security to make sure that I'm
or my doctor and it's not just out there for the taking
It just can't be filched out of thin air
There's always those privacy concerns and things are going on to deal with that
but it is quite a difficult process
there's the whole thing about should government get involved in this kind of
thing or should they not get involved
sometimes when governments get involved they don't necessarily do a good job of it
and maybe they stamp on things that
should be left open to create innovation
and maybe they leave things open that should be closed
It really needs experts
feel for what the ramifications are of this stuff going on
to be able to recommend the right way and recommend difficulties and so forth, so
it takes a while I think to get these things rights.
so it sounds like
if I'm hearing you right, great opportunity in this space
certainly to improve personal health, personal fitness, those kind of things
medical
applications,but also still a shifting landscape in terms of
government oversight and some of the larger issues
Yes, then there's things like certification of the
devices and approvals for them working on the
various networks and government approvals and then there's the
insurance side as well, the insurance companies becoming more aware of the new
business models that can be created around those
and working with those, and there's a lot of awareness that's needed for that.
Well thank you for the insight. We appreciate that.