Telemedicine will be commonplace, I don’t think that trend will reverse. My wife’s doing it. It’s very very VERY efficient. Having bodies late and milling about an office slows things down. Obviously some issues will require physical presence, but a shocking number do not.[/quote]
Actually, this is just starting and scratching the surface.
I’ve had a few startups that reached out to me asking me if I was interested in running their mobile app group. There’s a few interesting concepts, all with the idea of no longer requiring in person contact. I’m not sure I agree with all the ideas will work but…it’s interesting to see some people thinking about this. Most of them are in the medical space..
1) Remote, self service hearing diagnostic and hear aid kit.
This startup is building a remote configurable hearing diagnostic and hear aid system. The concept is to allow some elderly in the rural/remote community with limited mobility and unable to reach hear specialistics to have access to top hearing specialists that live elsewhere (IE urban areas)… Their prototype involves shipping a medical hearing diagnostic kit to the person, and than providing a remote management console to a hearing specialist elsewhere to run the hearing tests one normally would need to see in person to do. They also are working on a hearing aid that can also be configured and tuned remotely. Part of the “kit” besides the medical device is a smartphone shipped with the package specifically customized and built just to run the the tests and configure the hearing aid. Interesting concept.
2) Second company is creating remote diagnostic tools to help parents diagnose if their developing kid has a higher chance of autism. Some of this is to capture day-to-day behavior of the kid and also some integratio to daycare etc. Supposedly the POC is being tested with part of the USAF. I didn’t quiet understand how things work, and how much of it was real and to be done, but whatver.
3) Third company was a startup that does remote diabetic management. (No ,it wasn’t Insulet, Dexcom, or Solara).
#1 and #3 had their Series A VC funding. #2 was funded by angel investors not yet at the Series A yet.
There’s a lot of energy and money being spent on remote medical diagnostic. It’s not just about being confined to home due to a pandemic they are trying to solve. A lot of these ideas came up because the pandemic caused people to think “what can we do with technology if you cannot physically be in close contact with someone else”…..And then the application of that is being applied to people who do not have easy access to good medical care (IE rural people etc)…
I think these ideas are a lot more exciting than companies like Peloton that make a connected exercise bike. I wouldn’t consider that really “tech”….lol.
That said, some of the medical diagnostic-ish stuff is also being applied to things like sports medicine/training. For example, glucose monitoring companies are starting to branch out to sports medicine/fitness training where some of the future products are to help athletics monitor their glucose levels, etc as part of a training regimen. I believe some of these devices probably don’t need as rigorous clearance from the FDA/etc…
