February 18th, 2009
Disease management becoming a consumer market
My blood pressure cuff now has a hockey stick graph.
It’s from Parks Associates, best known for its work in networking, and it shows personal disease management becoming a $460 million consumer market in four years, up from $100 million last year.
This must be true. They put it on their blog. (That’s where the illustration comes from.) Notice how the numbers go up from left-to-right? Draw a line across those bars and you get the hockey stick.
We’re talking here of Personal Health Records (PHR) and devices tied to them through digital recording and wireless networking.
I have written about this since 2003, calling it Always On, but Parks’ point is that computer networking makes the underlying devices far more attractive consumer products.
We are talking about things like blood pressure monitors, blood sugar devices, heart rate monitors, anything that gives you a regular reading on what you have.
When you can save the data or (better yet) transfer it to a scaled system which can analyze it and deliver alerts when needed, then you’ve got something immensely valuable.
And it’s finally about to happen.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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