My favorite thing I saw at CES 2015 was the Valedo medical device for lower back health. To me, it shows the start of where I think mHealth needs to and will go as the sensors and apps become more highly developed.
In the current mobile health market, we have an increasingly mature set of sensor options available. They are doing a better and better job of sensing various health data. On the other side of the equation, we have more apps that are trying to gamify our health and wellness. Basically, they’re working to make being healthy and living well into a game that’s fun for everyone to do. One problem is that these two worlds currently don’t meet.
This is what made Valedo so interesting to me. They have an FDA cleared sensor tied together with a literal game app you can use with the sensor. If we look at the evolution of this, Wii Fit certainly was the first to popularize the idea of using sensors to get us healthy. Although, the fitness part always felt like more of a byproduct and clever marketing as opposed to the actual goal of the game designers.
Valedo has taken a different approach. They started with the health result in mind first: lower back pain and have applied a sensor and game to try and solve that problem. How do we know this is true? The Valedo is FDA cleared. Last I checked, the Wii Fit wasn’t FDA cleared.
Here’s a video (a bit dramatized I admit) look at how the Valedo works:
While I’d still like to have a Valedo of my own so I could see it’s actual impact and effectiveness, I think this approach is setting the standard for the type of digital health applications we’ll see in the future. The Valedo is just first of many examples where we’ll see sensors, gaming, and health come together in an amazing way.
