LAS VEGAS—If you asked me what I'm most excited to see at CES 2015, I don't think I ever thought the answer would be adhesive bandages. And yet, it is.
As the annual consumer electronics show gears up for its opening day this week, I've been thinking hard about what makes technology for everyday health and wellness actually valuable. Health tech is rarely as eye-catching or jaw-dropping as the latest toy drones, 3D printers, and 4K TV sets. But health tech products have to be uniquely useful, accurate, and convenient to use. Adhesive bandages, as a mechanism for health and wellness technology, are turning out to be incredibly exciting for those very reasons.
Two products catching my eye so far are TempTraq by Blue Spark Technologies for monitoring a baby's temperature, and AmpStrip by FitLinxx, which helps athletes know how hard to train and when to rest. Both are essentially a set of sensors tucked into a small adhesive bandage that sticks to your skin, with Bluetooth capabilities for sending the data they collect to a smartphone and companion mobile app.
The use of an adhesive patch isn't exactly new, as health company Vital Connect beat these others to the punch some time ago with Health Patch, a smart patch first used by doctors to monitor outpatients (called HealthPatch MD). Imagine you are recovering from surgery and don't necessarily need to be in the hospital anymore, but your care team wants to keep an eye on your vitals, or make sure you're not walking around too much. They can slap a HealthPatch MD on and send you on your way, trusting that they can monitor you remotely for about three days until the battery dies.
HealthPatch expanded into the consumer area not long ago with HealthPatch Biosensor for consumers. Like its more medical brother, it tracks heart rate, heart rate variability (largely used by athletes for determining rest and training time), respiratory rate, skin temperature, body posture (for fall detection), steps taken, and stress, which is measured by combining a few of the other data points being collected.
Back to those two products announced at CES: TempTraq makes use of the adhesive bandage application of a health sensor rather brilliantly, as it's designed for infants, to be applied under the arm. Though I haven't tried the TempTraq on an actual baby yet, it's easy to imagine how it would stay in place better than, say, a smart sock or a tiny bracelet, which the kid could kick off or which might not make consistent contact with the skin. A relatively temporary bandage is an ideal mechanism for sensors in this unique case.
If you have a sick infant and need to monitor her temperature, TempTraq can send you alerts via your smartphone and provide a table of both the current temperature and historic ones, which means you have a wealth of information, including fluctuations in temperature, to bring to a doctor if needed.
The AmpStrip, which is estimated to sell for $149 when it becomes available, is designed to be worn by adult athletes on their torso. That application doesn't seem to be as an ideal application for a Band-Aid-like product as TempTraq, as disposable patches are better suited for temporary use, like during an illness or recovery, in my opinion. Nevertheless, I fully endorse the experimentation. And perhaps certain kinds of athletes, such as triathletes, would prefer to wear a discrete and nearly invisible patch on the midsection as opposed to a tracker on their wrist, knowing it will stay in place as they transition to different environments (AmStrip is waterproof).
The real effect of introducing more adhesive bandages as vehicles for health technology is that fitness monitoring and health monitoring is starting to be seen by everyday consumers as something that's accessible to them. If a mother is comfortable understanding and applying a patch to her newborn to monitor his temperature, she may also feel comfortable and vaguely knowledgeable about wearing a patch herself the next time she's discharged from a hospital. And that means she may also see the benefit of wearing one to more safely train for her first half marathon.
As people become more comfortable with health-tracking devices in their own lives and more confident that they know how to use them, it makes it easier to use them in the medical arena, especially for preventive care, and that's good for everyone.