Advances in Healthcare Wearables, Connectivity

Steve Collens, CEO, MATTER HealthTech Incubator

Collens called it “an incredibly dynamic and exciting time for innovation and entrepreneurship in healthcare.”

“The ability to collect and store and analyze and act on data has evolved dramatically in the past few years,” he said. “It’s been an evolution involving everything from cloud storage to analytics to the penetration of electronic medical records to cultural shifts among health care providers. Five years ago, none of this was on anybody’s radar.” This includes wearable technology, he said, as new versions can give accurate information on heart rate, respiration and other vital signs.

“[Wearables] are rapidly becoming more interesting from a medical perspective,” he said. “[In the past], new medical devices usually meant a new type of forceps or a guide wire or a giant MRI imaging machine.”

Collens also said this should be a big year for a more connected healthcare system. He said Matter will work toward that goal by holding events and roundtables to forge connections.

“The healthcare system is in many ways incredibly backwards, slow to adapt new technologies and sort of layered with opacity and friction and inefficient market dynamics,” he said. “It creates, at the same time, a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to look for areas of the world where there are big markets, where there’s significant opportunity to improve efficiency or improve some aspect of the system. Regionally, we have an unbelievable array of health care resources and companies and assets — world leading companies in every dimension of health care. But the historical norm is that nobody really talks to each other. That creates huge challenges.”