I have spent a lot of time blogging about health wearables, particularly the Apple Watch, as a component of the Apple health ecosystem (see: Using the Apple Ecosystem to Support Health Research and Clinical Trials) and digital health (see: What Is Digital Health and How Does a Health System Get There?; Consideration of the Organizational and Personal Digital Health Managers of the Future). I view wearables, and the diagnostic devices that connect to mobile phones (see: Six-Lead, Consumer-Facing ECG Device Close to Release to Market), as key elements in the consumer-facing, home-based components in the first tier of healthcare (see: Defining and Delineating the Changing First Tier of Healthcare). A recent article discussed Sony's newly announced health wearable (see: Sony launches new B-to-B wearable and mobile health technology platform). Below is an excerpt from it, which is very informative:
Sony is jumping into the mobile health technology market, offering a business-to-business wearables solution to rival consumer-facing devices like Fitbit and the Apple Watch. The company launched a platform, called mSafety, that combines a connected wearable device, a wristwatch, with a cloud-based backend solution to provide payers, health systems, and app developers a ready-made platform to build remote health monitoring and mobile health applications....While the electronics giant offers medical technology for operating rooms and medical imaging, this is the company's first foray into mobile health and wearables. Sony is taking a different approach than Apple as the Apple Watch is a consumer-facing product. Sony's platform is a business-to-business solution that industry partners can leverage to build out and scale their own applications, according to the company....Sony's wearable is not a smartwatch....While the wearable watch has sensors to monitor heart rate and sleep position, developers will use the platform to build out unique features and capabilities for specific healthcare use cases....It also features a Bluetooth interface to connect to external devices.....It's designed for healthcare use cases to provide continuous monitoring for people living with chronic health conditions, like diabetes or cardiovascular disease, or for at-risk seniors living in their own homes.
At first glance, I was confused by Sony's representation of its mSafety product as "a business to business wearable." The leading competitor in the field, Apple Watch, already provides connectivity to other home diagnostic devices as well as diagnostic apps on the watch itself. Interestingly enough, Apple generally downplays this connectivity feature. Where is the competitive edge for Sony against Apple? To answer this question, I turned to the Sony mSafety web page and came across phrases like "freedom through connectivity," "energy-efficient purpose-built wearable," and "low complexity wearable."
I concluded that Sony was actually offering, by way of mSafety, a home connectivity device designed primarily for seniors with chronic health conditions. It presumably has a lower price point than the Apple watch and is less complex for users to install and maintain. This should appeal to health systems and insurance companies. The latter may want to choose this Sony health platform to monitor older patients at home and prevent readmissions to the hospital. To reinforce this very point on the mSafety web site, Sony posits that a large portion of healthcare lies in selfcare/monitoring as well as a "medical IoT platform (see: Does the future of healthcare lie in selfcare?).
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