eHealth And Consumer Electronics

The consumer electronics companies have started taking a keen interest in the growing market for therapeutic and well-being products. The three areas currently being addressed by vendors are diet management, fitness monitoring and mental exercise. With incumbent healthcare providers and government health departments promoting preventative healthcare programmes, these vendors could find themselves drawn into the mainstream healthcare sector.

Fitness monitoring is a mature market, with cardio monitoring and activity measurement devices fitted to equipment in gyms and fitness centres across the world. Advances in wireless technology coupled with the falling price of exercise equipment have seen fitness monitoring expand out of the gym and into the home. An increasing number of middle aged and late middle aged people are determined to maintain an active lifestyle as long as possible and incorporate a weekly cycle ride or run into their exercise regime. These people are purchasing GPS based pedometers to measure and monitor their performance and, in some cases, upload performance data to a fitness monitoring web site.

An increased awareness of the impact of stress on health has encouraged employers to adopt stress reduction and monitoring programmes. The equipment used in some of these programmes is based on a simple electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring device and software that trains the user to breathe correctly. If the medical theory linking breathing, heart rate and state of mind becomes more widely accepted, sales for such devices and the supporting stress management programmes will grow. This in turn will take ECG monitoring into the consumer electronics market.

Online services that help people manage their diets have attracted the interest of mobile phone companies who are well aware of the publicity that these services generate. Established weight management providers are also adding mobile phone based services to their product portfolios. Built on SMS text or video messaging platforms, personalised diet management services are relatively easy to deploy and manage.

Today an increasing number of people regularly use some form of cardio or activity monitoring device, and a growing amount of ECG data is being uploaded onto web sites for analysis. In the long term this could impact on the healthcare market, with a network of health and fitness equipment providers creating their own preventative healthcare platform. This report examines the technology and services that are being deployed and how vendors and healthcare providers are positioning themselves within the consumer ehealth sector.