Brain robots, biowearables, AI & femtech: What we learned at WIRED Health
Notes from the cutting edge of wearables and digital health tech
Welcome to this week’s free PULSE by Wareable newsletter, where we’re reporting from WIRED Health in London.
We attended the one-day event at Kings Place last year, and it provided a fascinating insight into the world of connected health technologies. This year has been no different.
Read below for our picks of the conference tracks, hot topics, and expert insights – as well as the startups and companies making waves in digital health.
Note: We’ve switched things around this week, so our paid podcast episode will instead land on Friday.
The enduring challenges faced by femtech
One of the most interesting tracks was a panel featuring long-time connected health CEO Tania Boler of Elvie, Valentina Milanova of Daye, and Eileen Burbidge of Fertifa.
The panel focused on the challenges of creating wearables and connected health services for women in the face of huge “data gaps,” and a dearth of clinical studies in the women’s health space – despite women making up 51% of the population.
Boler pointed to the “taboo and lack of education” around women’s sexual and reproductive health, with the purse strings for grants and funding historically held by men at tech companies who “won’t be thinking about women’s health and don’t have that in the front of their mind.”
The panel also discussed how studies are biased towards men due to a lack of females in clinical trials because “females are ‘vessels of life'“, and even biases in using male mice for tests for fear that menstrual cycle changes will “pollute the quality of clinical data,'“ said Milanova.
While we have seen an uptick in wearables and femtech this year, Milanova said that her biggest fear was still the scarcity of funding for female research projects.
“There’s a valley of innovation death in gynecological health, so even if you have good ideas and get funding for them, a lot of great ideas die along the way.
“That’s my biggest fear about the femtech space, because most of the female founders I know are working under extreme scarcity because the funding isn’t available, and that will have an impact on the quality of the products.”
AI, biowearables and the fight against chronic disease
Abbott took to the stage last year to talk up Lingo, its consumer biowearable, just after its announcement in the UK. After a full launch around CES 2024, Olivier Ropars, Division VP of Lingo Biowearables, returned to Wired Health to reassert the importance of its continuous glucose monitor (CGM) service.
With 80% of chronic diseases directly caused by lifestyle factors, Ropars pointed to the need for better insights into our health.
Repeated glucose spikes can lead to an array of severe health (cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and mental health problems). And with more sugar and refined carbohydrates in our diets than ever before, young people can expect to be the first generation to face a shorter life expectancy than their parents.
Lingo uses the Abbott FreeStyle Libre CGM to train users to mitigate spikes in glucose caused by the things we eat and drink, with a focus on behavior change.
Ropars said: “With the help of biowearables and glucose monitoring, we can understand in real-time how lifestyle choices - such as food, activities, and stressors - impact our health. A biowearable is like having a window into your body, making the invisible visible.”
AI also naturally plays a role here in learning from large data sets - but also in tailoring advice to the individual.
“With AI advancements, we can understand large bodies of data,” and Ropars also pointed to the role wearables can play in changing behaviors.
How AI is shaping consumer healthcare
Unsurprisingly, AI figured in almost every talk at Wired Health. So much so, actually, that Susan Thomas, Clinical Director of Google Health, warned the digital health industry of being sucked towards AI at the cost of everything else.
But the talk on AI and healthcare with Thomas and Andy Hickl, CTO of The Allen Institute, about the “third wave of generative AI” was refreshingly realistic about the potential and challenges of AI in healthcare.
Thomas talked about how GenAI had the power to make healthcare more accessible by tailoring diagnosis and medical communication to the individuals’ health literacy. This means everyone could understand their condition and situation, regardless of the language used by doctors.
Thomas highlighted the AI coaching introduced by Google in Fitbit on Android, explaining how similar coaching could be rolled out to those with hypertension or other medical conditions typically managed through lifestyle changes.
She also talked about Google Lens in the US, which employs AI in patient-taken images of moles to better guide conversations with doctors.
Thomas also talked up another Google project - one that uses AI to enable expert-level ultrasound analysis using a low-cost sensor and untrained operators.
“Three sweeps of the woman’s abdomen with a low-cost ultrasound device can generate gestational age and positional information with no difference from a professional setting, making access cheaper and easier.”
How consumer wearables and AI are transforming life for chronic pain suffers
An excellent session by Matt McDonald, Director of Discovery, Data and Design of Boston Scientific discussed the potential of wearables for chronic pain relief.
Around 30% of people live with chronic pain, but medications and traditional treatments can affect quality of life, with side effects ranging from mental health conditions to addiction.
Boston Scientific has developed a non-invasive spinal cord stimulation device, which has helped 84% of patients overcome chronic pain.
But it’s also using wearables to hone that treatment, thanks to collaboration with IBM.
It found that biomarkers from consumer wearables - such as heart rate, heart rate variability, step count, and stand time - can model different aspects of pain.
That means wearable biomarkers can be used to predict therapy outcomes in people with chronic pain, enabling continuous, real-time monitoring.
How design is essential for consumer health
Wired Health closed with legendary designer Yves Béhar, who talked about the importance of design in healthcare.
Many will know Béhar as the mastermind behind the Jawbone UP, released in 2011 and still one of the most iconic and best-designed wearables.
He discussed a few of his health and wearable products, including the Cionic Neural Sleeve (above), an FDA-approved wearable that uses electrical stimulation for foot drop, leg muscle weakness, and also stroke recovery.
“Designing for the body is very complex, but we wanted to get away from the stigma of being a medical device and mirror the journey of an elite athlete,” he said.
Béhar talked about the importance of making design desirable and inclusive – and that consumers become frustrated when “their experience with healthcare differs from what they experience at an Apple Store” regarding touchpoints such as devices, apps, and even physical spaces.
Fuse Project is currently working on its Opus Sound Bed, which uses vibration and sound to put the user into a meditative state and relieve stress, acting as, what he described as, “meditation for dummies."
Startup focus: Robeaute
The Wired Health startup award winner was Robeaute, a neurosurgical microrobot that can be inserted into the brain to offer live data on brain conditions.
Once in the brain, it can travel around to collect data and broadcast back data.
The French startup will focus on identifying tumor hotspots in patients, while also helping determine the best course of treatment for brain tumors. It will also go on to deliver and tailor drug delivery.
The company is engaged in pre-clinical trials, which it says is yielding positive results.
Startup focus: The Blood & Daye
Two super-interesting startups caught the eye at Wired Health – both of which tackle women’s health diagnoses in similar ways.
Berlin-based The Blood takes advantage of period blood as a source of unique cells, which can then be used to non-invasively test for a huge array of women’s health conditions.
Endometriosis, fertility, menopause, and POS are just a few that can be detected via a test from The Blood – which works much like a 23andme test, with results back in 48 hours.
It’s planning separate tests for nutrient deficiencies, menopause, and fertility.
London-based startup Daye takes a similar tact, but uses vaginal discharge (rather than blood) to diagnose infections, STIs and even monitor the likelihood of IVF success.