Digital health is a growing focus at the Consumer Electronics Show, with a healthy showing of companies and participation by powerhouses including the AARP, the National Sleep Foundation, Abbott, Samsung Health, and Withings. CES 2025 saw a focus on health AI, wearables, and robotics, as well as the return of smart mirror technologies incorporating wireless biometric sensing technologies. In the US market, 54% of internet households own a connected health device, though this nearly entirely due to use of wearables with health and wellness features, pointing to the popularity of this product category.

As someone with a background in public health, and who has been following the digital health market for nigh on a decade now, I’ve seen a lot of companies launch into the digital health space. I’ve also seen a lot of companies fail to launch into the digital health space. It’s a challenging market – highly regulated, with very set and determined ways of doing things. And oftentimes consumers – patients – are not very interested in engaging on their own. Many solutions with fantastic technology have faced challenges when it comes to their business models.

What I was most excited by this year was speaking with companies such as Myant and OnMed, which offer not only innovative and impactful technologies but also solid solutions that fit well into the current care modality:

• Myant uses garment-based sensing technology as a replacement for the bulky Holters currently used to diagnose arrhythmias via Holter studies. Care providers are able to ship Myant’s cardiac sensing garments directly to the patient’s home, where the patient can put the device on themselves – guided by Myant’s care support team – without having to schedule an appointment to come in. This garment is small, lightweight, and comfortable enough for patients to wear for a full 30 days, enabling more accurate diagnoses than a 24-hour or 14-day study, and far higher levels of patient compliance than current Holter solutions. Myant has made the cardiac garment available to clinicians via a consignment model, offering revenue sharing from standard CPT code billing, and removing the barrier of cost. Once a patient has a cardiac garment, they are also able to reuse it for teleconsults with their clinician later on. Myant is also examining using its solution for monitoring congestive heart failure, a chronic condition suffered by over 6 million Americans.
• OnMed offers a clinic-in-a-box solution, called the CareStation, that allows patients in underserved areas to perform televisits with state-licensed clinicians. The secret sauce is the assortment of sensors and devices within the CareStation itself – the digital weight scale built into the floor, the wireless temperature monitor that reads the patient’s temperature without them needing to do anything, the stethoscope and blood pressure cuff built into the device itself. What makes OnMed special – compared to other kiosk solutions that entered this market a decade ago and failed – is its business model: it is a B2B company, with the CareStations purchased by local care provider organizations and sponsors and the televisits conducted by licensed clinicians – either from third party staffing firms, or the sponsoring organization.

The world isn’t getting any healthier – in fact, in many ways, peoples’ health has worsened compared to the world of a decade ago. And an aging population, lack of clinicians, and skyrocketing care costs are adding further challenges. Digital health is more needed than ever – especially practical solutions that solve real-world needs – and the opportunity is immense for companies that find the right use case and business model.

For more information on consumer demand for health and safety features in their wearable devices, check out Parks Associates Quantified Consumer study: Wearables: Advances in Health & Safety, available here: https://www.parksassociates.com/products/wellness-and-fitness/wearables-advances-in-health-safety