Jonah Comstock

Raleigh, North Carolina-based heart rate sensor company Valencell is suing both Apple and Fitbit over alleged patent infringement, and is accusing Apple of additional deceit as well.

The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize has extended its deadline and tweaked the requirements for its seven remaining finalists, the group announced last month.

Every year in January at CES in Las Vegas, consumer electronics companies hype the products they hope to release in the year to come. But a lot can happen over the course of a year, and these devices don’t always find their way to market. For the past several years we’ve rounded up the health-related product announcements at CES, and last year we published our first “where are they now” roundup of the previous year’s unveilings. Read on to see which products from CES 2015 saw the light of day and which ones we’re still waiting on. Products that launched in 2015 Garmin's three new activity trackers Garmin announced three new activity trackers at CES: fenix 3, epix, and Vivoactive. Fenix 3, with a suggested retail price of $499.99, offers features to track multisport activities including advanced fitness training, cross-country and alpine skiing, snowboarding, hiking, climbing, and trail running. Epix, with a suggested retail price of $549.99 is a smartwatch that can download apps that will use the its digital compass, altimeter, and barometer to track fitness activity. Vivoactive, the least expensive of the newly announced smartwatches, uses an accelerometer to track activity and retails for $249.99.  All three launched as planned in 2015. Withings Activite Pop In June 2014, Withings announced a wristworn activity tracker, called Withings Activite, that looks similar to a regular analog watch. The watch, designed in a Swiss village that’s known as a center of Swiss watchmaking, has a stainless steel watch case, sapphire scratch-proof glass, and French calf leather straps. It costs $450. At CES 2015, Withings announced a low-cost version of the device called Withings Activite Pop, which will cost $149.95. The Activite Pop offers all of the same fitness features that the Activite does, but is made with a PVD-coated watchcase and a "smooth silicone strap”. Not only did the Pop launch as planned in March, but Withings followed up with a third device, the Activite Steel, in November. Wellograph Wellograph’s 2015 announcement was actually just a software update: it added sleep tracking and body readiness testing to its existing device. In the new operating system, on top of activity tracking, the watch will give users information on their sleep cycles, if they were in deep or light sleep, and data on their REM sleep.  The update was meant to go live in late January, but according to App Annie it wasn’t pushed out until March. InBody Band InBody developed a wristworn activity tracker that measures body composition and will tell the user what their body fat is compared to lean tissue. InBody already offers four larger body composition devices. The company launched a Kickstarter campaign in February, shipped to backers in May, and launched to the public in November. The device is available on Amazon for $179.99, the same price the company promised back in January. Hexoskin Junior Hexoskin, maker of sensor-embedded clothing, unveiled Hexoskin Junior for youths last year. The shirt has all of the same sensors as the adult version: heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing rate, respiration volume, calories burned, and steps taken per minute. The Hexoskin Junior line is now available for purchase online, for $149 for just the shirt or $379 for the whole system including the device and app. TempTraq from Blue Spark Technologies West Lake, Ohio-based Blue Spark Technologies unveiled a peel-and-stick Bluetooth-connected thermometer for parents with young kids. The product, called TempTraq, allows parents to continuously monitor their child's temperature via a mobile app, including setting up alerts when it exceeds pre-set parameters. The thermometer can measure temperatures from 86 degrees to 108.3 degrees fahrenheit.  After securing FDA clearance in September, the device went on sale and can now be purchased online for $24.99. SleepIQ Kids by Sleep Number Sleep Number, which worked with BAM Labs to create its SleepIQ technology, announced a new bed for children last year. The bed is designed to adjust and grow as children age, and can be controlled by an app that either parents or kids can use, depending on the child's age and the parents' preference. It can also alert parents when the child gets out of bed and, like other SleepIQ offerings, measures average breathing, average heart rate and movement, and quality of sleep. The bed launched as planned this year and is available in a range of models from $799.99 to $1,699.98. nuyu Sleep System by Health o meter Another sleep tracker unveiled at CES15 was the nuyu Sleep System, which is also a temperature monitoring device. The system from Health o meter heats and cools the user's bed to promote optimal sleep health based on age, height, weight and ambient room temperature. It's built into a mattress pad that users fit beneath their sheets, and also serves as a sensor for sleep monitoring. Health o meter is also working on an activity monitor and a wireless scale. The nuyu Sleep System launched as planned and is available on the Health o meter website for $499.99. easyTek Smart Hearing Aids from Siemens Siemens announced its easyTek hearing aids, smartphone-connected devices that feature microphones pointed in four directions -- behind, in front, to the right and to the left. Depending on where their listening focus is and where the most distracting background noise is coming from, users can adjust the levels of those four directions from the app. Alternately, they'll be able to activate a smart setting that makes that determination for itself and automatically adjusts the levels. Because the devices are sold through a hearing care professional, they’re pricing information isn’t available, but the easyTek line does seem to have launched, as has the connected app. FLOOME from 2045Tech This Italian-designed smartphone-connected breathalyzer's launch is actually a reboot: Floome ran an Indiegogo campaign back in 2013 but didn't get very close to its goal. Floome connects through the headphone jack of an Apple, Android, or Window’s device. The device’s aesthetics stand out, with a rounded design in a variety of colors. It also calculates the user’s time to sobriety, and it doesn’t require a battery at all. The device has a removable cap for cleaning, and the app sports graphing, social sharing, and cab-calling capabilities. Floome may have taken a while to get to market, but it did launch this year, in July. It’s on sale via Floome’s website for $99. Independa TV from Independa Independa, a remote care and aging in place technology company, announced that its Independa TV offering, previously available only through a health system, will launch direct to consumer in 2015. The Independa TV system allows older people who might be less familiar with technology to access picture sharing, messaging, video chat, calendaring, reminders, a help button, and more through a familiar technology. Independa also announced the launch of a mobile app version of its caregiver web portal, complete with HealthKit and (planned) Apple Watch integration. Both those services launched in 2015 and are available via Independa’s website. Quitbit Quitbit launched its smartphone-connected lighter for cigarette tracking and smoking cessation through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in May 2014, but at CES the company announced that the device would go on sale for $99 and that preorders would ship in March. The Quitbit lighter has its own built-in display that tells users how long it’s been since their last cigarette and how many they have left for the day (if they set a limit). Since many smokers share lighters with friends or light a friend’s cigarette for them, the device has a three minute window after a first light-up when it doesn’t count subsequent uses. That way if the wind blows out a cigarette shortly after lighting it, it’s not counting it twice either. Quitbit preorders did not ship in March, but the company did get them out by the end of the year. According to the Kickstarter page, devices began shipping to backers in late November. The device is now selling for a little more — $129. Gymwatch Gymwatch announced its fitness sensor, which was developed to help those that are already fitness-focused and want to improve their workouts. The device is strapped around the user's arm or leg muscles and measures the user's starting strength, maximum strength, explosive strength, speed strength, and full range of movement. This way, the company explains, Gymwatch can help users do movements correctly and with the optimum intensity. After a successful $160,000 crowdfunding campaign, Gymwatch is available for purchase online for a sales price of $99. This month the company also partnered with German fitness fashion brand Gym Aesthetics. iSwimband iSwimband had developed a sensor that will alert its companion app if someone wearing the sensor has been in the water for longer than preset limits or if a non-swimmer falls into the water. The device costs $79 and according to PC Mag, comes with clip-on attachments and bands so it can be worn on the wrist or clothing.  The story looked good for iSwimband, but unfortunately the company is now out of business, a former associate of the business has confirmed to MobiHealthNews. The device ran a successful Indiegogo campaign this past summer and even shipped devices to backers, but apparently legal troubles and failure to get traction with investors did the startup in. Pacif-i from BlueMaestro MobiHealthNews has written before about Pacif-i, a dishwasher-proof smart pacifier, which has a built-in temperature sensor that will track their babies’ temperature over time. It transmits information to the parents’ iOS and Android devices through Bluetooth Smart and a companion app. At CES BlueMaestro showed off the device and announced new details about pricing and availability: the device will be available starting in February for $39.  According to a blog post, the company began shipping its final batch of preorders just this month. The product also appeared on CBS’s CSI: Cyber with Ted Danson. It’s now retailing for 42 pounds, or about $62, a bit of a jump from the preorder pricing. Quell from NeuroMetrix NeuroMetrix's $250 Quell device is a wearable not just for monitoring health, but for pain relief. The device, which launches later this spring, will use nerve stimulation to treat chronic pain by sending signals to the brain that cause it to release natural opioids. Quell is also Bluetooth-connected, so patients can track and manage their therapy via an app. It has already received FDA clearance. The device launched more or less on schedule on June 15, and is now available for $249.00 from NeuroMetrix’s world. Swarovski Collection from Misfit Misfit, maker of the Shine and Flash activity trackers, has partnered with Swarovski to create two new versions of the Shine that feature a crystal face and look even more like jewelry than the company’s original polished aluminum device. One of the devices, the violet Swarovski Shine, uses solar charging to stay powered up — sunlight, LEDs, or halogen lighting all keep the device up and running. Like all Shine devices the two in the Swarovski Shine collection feature a watch battery that have a six month lifespan, according to the company.  The Swarovski line was released as scheduled and is now available for purchase on Misfit’s website. The partnership wasn’t hampered by Misfit’s acquisition by the Fossil Group earlier this year. GoBe from HealBe HealBe's controversial GoBe calorie tracking bracelet resurfaced at CES, with some indications that the technology might be for real after all. For one, HealBe allowed the BBC to test the device at CES, and although the test was conducted on HealBe cofounder George Mikaberydze, not on a journalist, they did test out the device with foods selected by the BBC. The device proved reasonably accurate in the test. Second, the company announced that the devices would be available at the end of the month for $299 a piece. Over the course of the year HealBe has been subjected to much scrutiny by PandoDaily, who pointed out, among other things, a lack of evidence that the device actually tracks calories or nutrition as advertised. In January of this year, it finally launched (or at least sent out test devices to a number of journalists) to mixed reviews. Even those that proclaimed the calorie tracking function accurate found the device buggy, and others considered the calorie tracking features a total bust (in addition to finding the device buggy). Devices that didn't launch in 2015 Connected Cycle's smart pedal At CES, Paris, France-based Connected Cycle unveiled a smartphone-connected bike pedal. The pedal will notify the bike owner if their bike has been moved, but it also records the speed, route, incline, and calories burnt for all of the user's bike trips. Stats from the pedal are sent to the cloud and users can use a companion smartphone app to view them. The pedal charges itself so users don't have to worry about its battery life. Although only one pedal will have the smart technology, it is sold as part of a set for aesthetic reasons. Connected Cycle launched an Indiegogo for the product in April and raised $172,000, nearly three times its goal. The product was meant to ship by the end of the year, but the company had to set that deadline back. As of mid-December, they were testing a new prototype. TAO Wellness's isometric exercise systems TAO Wellness has created two exercise systems that the company presented at CES. The first device, called the TAO WellShell, and helps users to isometric exercises discretely in public places, for example on an airplane or at their desk during work. While TAO Wellness presented the device as a prototype at last year's event, since then, they launched a Kickstarter campaign for it and have now returned with a manufactured version. The other product, a prototype, called TAO Chair, allows users to work out while sitting down in their home. The chair's armrests move so users can push them with their arms or legs to work different muscle groups and strengthen their core. According to TAO’s website, the group plans to unveil both products at this year’s CES as well as “a new mobile game for TAO that incorporates exercise routines into a retro platformer type video game” and begin distribution immediately afterwards.  AmpStrip Shelton, Connecticut-based Fitlinxx, maker of the BtoB activity tracker Pebble, announced at CES that the company had launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for its newest device, a bandaid-like, direct-to-consumer, heart rate tracker, called AmpStrip. The sensor is a small patch that the user sticks on their torso. It tracks heart rate, calories burned, respiration, body temperature, and posture. Fitlinxx first announced the device in November 2014. This one has a pretty big update, which we dedicated a whole story to back in October. After raising more than $500,000 on Indiegogo for the device, Fitlinxx announced that it would not be developing AmpStrip as a fitness tracker, but rather as a medical device. The company will refund all of its nearly 4,000 backers on request. Parrot Zik Sport headphones At CES 2015, Parrot unveiled headphones with health sensing capabilities. The headphones track heart rate with an in-ear biometric sensor and analyze the user's running style, including cadence, ground contact time, and vertical oscillation. Users can view the data on a companion app. The headphones will also sync with other sport apps. Although Parrot Zik released a pair of headphones in 2015 — the Parrot Zik 3 — there’s been no sign of the Parrot Zik Sport, and no announcement from the company that we can find. VivaLnk eSkin Thermometer patch VivaLnk has developed a thermometer patch that sticks on the user and tracks the user's fever. It sends this data to a connected smartphone app. The company says the thermometer takes a reading in less than three seconds.  Though it was originally planned to launch in the spring of 2015, the company is now saying it will launch in early 2016. The price point has also gone up, from $15 to $20 up to $59.00 on the company’s pre-order page. The product also has a new name now, Fever Scout. Bloom Ring from Prima-Temp One more temperature sensor is from Prima-Temp, and it's aimed at women and couples trying to conceive a child. Called the Bloom Ring, the device is a connected, self-inserted device that measures a woman's core body temperature and then sends her a smartphone alert when she's most fertile. The company unveiled the sensor and app at CES, but didn't mention when it would be commercially available or at what price. Prima-Temp changed its product name from Bloom Ring to Priya Ring, and it has had a rocky road to launch — an October crowdfunding campaign for the device raised less than $2,000, just 6 percent of its goal. The company still plans to launch the device, however, and is taking preorders on its website. Mint from Breathometer Breathometer has long planned to expand its product offering from breathalyzers into oral and even respiratory health. Their first product in that vein, Mint, is designed to improve oral health and hydration. Mint measures breath quality and hydration level. Mint was announced at CES and also began crowdfunding on Indiegogo, where supporters could pre-order a device for $99. They planned to ship devices in August 2015. The company’s crowdfunding campaign went very well — they were over 326 percent funded with more than $100,000 raised. But there were some hiccups the product development. Shipping is now scheduled for Q1 2016. Epic Alert from Epic Safety Vancouver-based Epic Safety (no relation to the EHR vendor) launched a new line of mobile personal emergency response systems (mPERS) called Epic Alert. The system includes a base unit, an automatic fall sensor, a wearable pendant, a door contact, a motion detector, and a waterproof wall unit. Through the pendant, users can have two-way voice communication with a help center, one-touch calls for emergency assistance, and automatic fall detection. It’s not clear that any of these devices are actually available for purchase yet. The company’s website provides only a form for requesting more information. Baby GlGl from Slow Control (formerly HAPILabs) Finally, the company that delivered the HAPIFork last year (a smart fork that detects how fast the user eats) returned this year with a smart baby bottle that monitors a baby's milk consumption, with an aim on preventing bouts of colic. The company has since changed its name from HAPILabs to Slow Control and rebranded the HAPIFork as the 10S Fork. Baby GIGI is still listed as “Coming Soon” on the Slow Control website. The company is also now developing “Yum & Done”, an interactive digital offering to help young children finish meals without getting distracted. Aterica's Veta Aterica announced that their first product, a smartphone-connected case for an EpiPen, called Veta, is open for pre-orders. The case has a flashing light and audio alerts that can help the user locate the EpiPen if it's been misplaced. Veta also has a proximity alert that will tell users via their mobile device if they left the case behind. Users can customize the proximity alerts by providing flexibility if they are in low-risk locations, like their home. Temperature sensors in the case can alert the user if the EpiPen gets too hot or too cold and if the user has an allergic reaction and take the cap off the smart case, an alert will be sent to caregivers in the user's network.  According to Aterica’s latest blog post, delivery of pre-ordered Veta devices, originally scheduled for Fall 2015, is now on track for February 2016. The devices can still be preordered for $59.99. Bragi Dash Bragi unveiled a demo of the company's fitness-sensing earbuds at CES. Dash plays music via Bluetooth and tracks pace, steps, cadence, distance, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and energy spent. The product, which completed a Kickstarter campaign in March 2014, was not yet complete when it was demoed at CES, but the company said they plan to ship Dash in the spring. The Dash is available for preorder for $299. The earphones are still only available for preorder on Bragi’s website. They now say they will ship in January 2016. Cambridge Consultants XelfleX Cambridge Consultants unveiled its XelfleX smart fabric that measures body movement using fiber optic thread instead of embedding the clothing with sensors. This way, the clothing is "inherently smart", the company explains. The clothing could be used for fitness and sports coaching, for example "to help perfect a tennis serve, golf swing or ski technique, or as part of a physiotherapy to help patients recover after injury, surgery, or neurological problems".  Unlike many of the devices announced last year, XelfleX was never meant to launch this year. It’s still under development. Emotia's Belty Emotia demoed its prototype for a smart belt, called Belty, according to Engadget. The belt will is motorized and will tighten or loosen itself so that the user stays comfortable while moving around. The belt also tracks steps and sends this data to a companion app via Bluetooth. The belt can also vibrate with a user has been sedentary for too long. Finally, it keeps tabs on changing waist measurements so that it can notify users if they are at risk for weight gain. Initially, the company told Engadget it was planning to launch by the end of 2015. However, the company is now accepting $395 preorders with a promised shipping date of December 2016. Zensorium Being Zensorium announced at CES that the company's new product, a smartwatch that continuously tracks your mood, heart rate, and activity, would go on sale for preorder. The device cost $169.15 if preordered and was meant to be shipped in April 2015. It will retail for $199. Being's most significant feature is its mood tracking. The device will map the user's mood into four different zones, excited, distress, normal, and calm using heart rate and changes in blood pressure. It will also differentiate good stress from bad stress. As of now, the device is still available only for preorder, now at the full price of $199. Consumer Physics SCiO SCiO, a tiny spectrometer that says it will send information about food, nutrition, and medication to a user’s smartphone via Bluetooth Low Energy, announced that the estimated ship date for the device was July 2015. SCiO raised $2.2 million on Kickstarter, on top of $4 million to $5 million in funding from venture capitalists including Khosla Ventures. According to the company, device will be able to scan foods and return information about their nutritional content, assess the ripeness of fruit through its skin, assess the health of plants, analyze soil, and authenticate medications. Specifically, for scanned foods, it will return results for calories, fat, protein, and carbs.  SCiO didn’t launch in July, and in fact hasn’t shipped yet as far as we can tell. Linx IAS from BlackBox Biometrics BlackBox Biometrics showed off its concussion sensor, a product for athletes that follows up on their Blast Gauge system used by the military for measuring the impact of explosives on soldiers. The Linx IAS has a similar form factor to MC10 and Reebok's Checklight -- a small sensor fitted into the back of a mesh helmet inset or headband that measures the impact of a potential concussion. After a head injury, athletes can check a green, yellow, or red light to see whether it needs immediate attention, and parents and coaches can have that same assessment sent directly to their smartphone. Linx IAS has not yet launched for consumer purchase — it’s still "coming soon". But the company may have found another kind of buyer for the technology. They announced this month they partnered with the U.S. Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory to develop the technology for the field. Sensoria Smart Socks for physical therapy Sensoria is working with Respondwell to create a new version of its fitness tracking socks for rehabilitation patient monitoring. The technology will allow patients to do exercises and receive feedback immediately from a therapist connected via a tablet app. In the future, the two companies might also work together for stroke rehabilitation, disease management, sports rehabilitation and to improve general wellness. There hasn’t been any more news all year about the Respondwell partnership, but in October Sensoria did embark on a clinical partnership, with Orthotics Holdings Incorporated (OHI). Lenovo VIBE Band Smartphone maker Lenovo showed off its $89 smart watch and fitness tracker, the Lenovo VIBE Band. The device sports a curved metal and glass screen and measures steps, calories, travel distance and sleep quality. It's also waterproof and its battery lasts seven days.  There hasn’t been any more word about the Vibe Band since January. During the year, Lenovo bought Motorola and rumors circulated that they would be killing the entire Vibe line to make room for Motorola’s products. It’s possible the Band was shelved as a result. Products that launched partially in 2015 QardioBase and QardioMD Qardio, maker of a connected, discrete blood pressure monitor, announced two new products at CES, QardioBase, a scale, and QardioMD, a heart health management system. QardioBase measures body weight, body fat, muscle, water and bone composition, and BMI. The device also has a pregnancy mode so that pregnant woman can track their progress. QardioMD, a software program, helps care providers manage a patient's heart health by collecting and displaying EKG/ECG, heart rate, and blood pressure measurements from Qardio's devices.  Qardio expected both to be available in the Spring. In fact, while QardioBase is now available (as is a blood pressure monitor called QardioArm), QardioMD is still “coming soon”. So is QardioCore, the company’s chest-strap EKG device. Various products from First Alert Home safety company First Alert, a subsidiary of the Jardin Corporation, is planning to roll out a suite of products in 2015, many of which are health or fitness related. The company announced a WiFi combined smoke and carbon monoxide alarm; a WiFi environment monitor that monitors carbon monoxide, temperature, and humidity; and a connected watch that monitors the user’s heart rate, activity level and calories burned, as well as sleep data at night. Some of these devices have launched, some haven’t. The smoke and carbon monoxide alarm can be purchased now from First Alert’s website, while the environment monitor is listed as coming soon. There’s no mention on the website of the connected watch.  

There was a lot of provider news in 2015, with hospitals across the country deploying digital health tools not only in pilots but sometimes in full-scale deployments. The list of notable example below, while long, is by no means comprehensive.  Trend: New joint ventures Some hospital systems launched new business ventures focused specifically on digital health. In February, telecom giant Cox Communications announced that it was teaming up with the Cleveland Clinic to form a “strategic alliance”, called Vivre Health, that would develop digital home health services. The joint venture will be based in Atlanta and will help Cox move its healthcare business beyond providing broadband services to hospitals, according to Reuters. As part of the announcement Cox disclosed that it had also made an investment in health kiosk company HealthSpot, but the amount remains undisclosed. In March, GE Ventures and Stanford Health Care teamed up to create Evidation Health, a company focused on evaluating the efficacy of digital health technologies. Soon after Evidation was formed it merged with wellness engagement platform company The Activity Exchange. In addition to Stanford, Evidation announced in November that it would also be working with Ochsner Health System. And in May, Meridian Health subsidiary iMPak Health teamed up with biomedical and healthcare technology group NetScientific to create a new digital health sales and marketing company called Triventis Health. Triventis will market combined offerings from iMPak and Wanda Health, a subsidiary of NetScientific, relying on Wanda Health’s offerings for data analytics and IMPak’s easy-to-use devices for remote monitoring. The product offerings will be rolled out first at Meridian Health hospitals, and then marketed to different hospitals around the country. Finally, Brigham and Women’s Hospital partnered with seed fund Rock Health to test and possibly integrate technologies from companies in Rock Health’s portfolio. The two organizations launched the partnership this summer and it is expected to last three years. Trend: Video visits and the return of the house call Probably the biggest digital health trend in 2015 has been remote visits. Big companies like Teladoc, American Well, and Doctor on Demand grew immensely this year, signing on big payer and provider companies alike. The growth was not without some infighting — American Well and Teladoc are embroiled in a patent fight, and the companies also scuffled in October over a Highmark contract Teladoc lost to its competitors in October. The incident highlighted some tensions over what the business model for telemedicine will be going forward. Over the course of the year, several hospital systems this have invested in one way or another in this area of telemedicine. Minneapolis, Minnesota-based health system Fairview Health made a “significant” strategic investment in January in telemedicine company Zipnosis, which it has been working with the past several years. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. And later in the month Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, a 1,000 bed facility with $2.1 billion in operating revenue, invested $20 million to build two new urgent care centers and to create a video visits program that would enable the hospital to help patients while keeping them out of their physical facility. California health system Sutter Health launched a new iOS app in February that includes remote visits via MDLive, a company Sutter invested in early last year. MultiCare Health System announced in April that it would offer video visits to Washington-based patients via Doctor On Demand. In June, the Cleveland Clinic released a new video visits app for Ohio residents, called MyCare Online, that offers patients 24-hour access to a medical professional for urgent care needs. The service is powered by American Well. In the fourth quarter, American Well scored two other big provider wins: Intermountain Healthcare and Community Health Systems. Intermountain Connect Care will be launched in 2016 and Community Health Systems will start rolling out American Well's VirtualHealthNow platform to local networks in Oklahoma and Washington and continue into Arizona and Pennsylvania in the coming months. As new opportunities in telemedicine emerge, the old ones die out. This year also saw German company Bosch officially closing its US subsidiary Robert Bosch Healthcare, reducing the scope its healthcare operations to a 50-person team based in Germany. Bosch began offering the Health Buddy chronic disease management system after acquiring it about eight years ago. And this year saw the launch of a couple of apps that could be the next generation of video visits: a return to the house call, now aided by digital tools. Various services that launched in that wheelhouse this year include Heal, Pager, FirstLine Medical, MedZed, Dispatch Health, FRND, PediaQ, and Circle Medical. Dispatch Health notably partnered with a health system, Centura in Colorado, to make its offering available to its patients. While many of these offerings have applied the appellation “Uber for Health” to themselves, Uber itself showed it might not be willing to give up on that title, partnering with Boston Children’s Hospital, Voalte, and Practo this year, as well as announcing senior care partnerships at the White House Summit on Aging. Meanwhile Sherpaa CEO Jay Parkinson made the case, based on his own experience, that digitally-enabled house calls are not sustainable or scalable. Sherpaa provides an additional telemedicine modality, one based mostly on asynchronous messaging. Another company with that business model, Talkspace, announced research partnerships with Duke University and Columbia University in the mental health space. Telemedicine’s growing pains included plenty of legal and legislative activity. For one thing, Teladoc's antitrust lawsuit against the Texas Medical Board continued, costing Teladoc upwards of $7 million in legal fees according to the company's first earnings call. The Attorney General of Texas weighed in on that case on the medical board's behalf, arguing that there is, in fact, state supervision of the medical board which would make it a state agency under law and therefore immune to suit, but a judge shot down that argument this month. The TMB is now appealing that ruling. Texas wasn't the only state dealing with telemedicine laws. Over 200 bills related to telemedicine were floated in state legislatures in 2015. The Federation of State Medical Board’s proposed interstate licensing compact accounted for some of the bills passed this year. Eleven states (Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming) passed the medical licensure compact language in 2015, all by large margins. Only seven states needed to pass the compact to put it into effect. In October, the American Medical Association began the process of creating a host of new CPT codes to support the reimbursement of telemedicine. The codes are especially important for Medicare, which has strict guidelines on what it will and won't reimburse. At present there are various CPT codes originally intended for face-to-face encounters that can also be used for different telemedicine services, but a set of standardized, explicit codes would go a long way toward making providers feel comfortable seeking reimbursement for virtual encounters, and some of them may even pay not just for the service, but the technology itself. Also during the year, the American Medical Association had a chance to weigh in on the ongoing regulatory conflicts around telemedicine, but ultimately didn't lay down any guidelines. The AMA’s ethics council attempted to come to an agreement over a set of guidelines focused on ethical considerations related to the use of online or mobile visits between patients and physicians, but a physician from Texas helped convince the committee to rethink its plans. The guidelines were tabled and sent back to committee for further review. In 2015, the federal government introduced two bills that could supersede local laws for VA and Medicare patient populations. The TELEmedicine for MEDicare Act of 2015 (TELEMED Act) and the Veterans E-Health and Telemedicine Support Act of 2015 would create an interstate license, similar to a driver’s license, for practicing medicine on VA and Medicare populations. Also on the federal level, the ONC proposed some best practices for consumer telehealth, although we pointed out at the time that the exclusion of consumer telehealth companies from that meeting was problematic. Telemedicine even cropped up on Hillary Clinton's campaign trail, with the former Secretary of State declaring her intentions to "streamline licensing and explore how to make that reimbursable under Medicare" at a campaign stop in Iowa. Trend: Patient-facing tools A number of hospitals, particularly children's hospitals have been releasing patient-facing mobile offerings this year to increase engagement. Miami Children’s Hospital has been developing mobile tools for patients for several years, but in a January interview CIO Edward Martinez said the most recent feature that they plan to release is a virtual discharge option so that the hospital can record a video of the discharge process. Another app Miami Children’s has created is a care coordination app for its clinicians, which allows providers who are finished with their shift to enter information about a patient’s condition quickly on a mobile device and pass it to the next clinician. Parents can also keep tabs on those transitions via an app called Care Notes and, as a result, stay up to date on their child’s condition. In March, Reiter, Hill, Johnson & Nevin (RHJN), an OBGYN private practice in Washington, DC, inked a deal with Washington DC-based Babyscripts, which offers a “Mommy Kit” that includes its pregnancy app and partner connected health devices. The provider will equip its patients with a kit, called Mommy Kit, that includes a smartphone-connected weight scale and connected blood pressure monitor. The devices are either from Withings or iHealth depending on which the customer prefers. That same month an article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted three different hospitals using tablets in their ICUs: Project Emerge, at Johns Hopkins University, the Patient-Centered ToolKit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and MyICU, a project under development at Beth Israel Deaconess. In developing these projects, each hospital found that patients often feel like they’re treated with a lack of respect and dignity in the ICU. Mobile software that allows patients and families a direct line to their care team — that doesn’t involve physically tracking down a busy ICU doctor or nurse — lets families air those concerns and allows hospitals to become progressively better at ameliorating them. Also in March, Phoenix Children’s Hospital announced that it will install 200 tablets in patient rooms to provide patients and their families with customized, interactive information about their treatment plan. Phoenix Children’s Hospital will digitize its “Journey Boards”, which are tools that help a child’s family understand discharge instructions before they take their child home from the hospital. Currently, the instructions are printed out and distributed to patients and their families. The year also saw Scripps Health finally launch an app for patients. Given Scripps Health’s early involvement in digital health, it was almost surprising that the provider waited this long to launch an informational app for patients. The health system's eponymous app, available for iOS and Android devices, allows patients and visitors to find information about Scripps physicians, hospitals, and clinics. The fourth quarter saw news of more patient-facing apps. Researchers from Johns Hopkins Department of Neurology and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Department of Neurosurgery developed an app for the Hydrocephalus Association, called HydroAssist. It allows users to manually enter their treatments, organize multiple treatments, and view a history of treatments that is sorted by procedure date. HydroAssist can share this data with other doctors in the case that the patient needs to be treated at a new facility. In November, Boston Children's Hospital released data from a discharge app pilot they launched last year. The app, called DisCo, was developed in-house, and the data showed that 74 percent and 90 percent of the two study groups respectively had no problems using the app. UCLA discussed a number of patient-facing app pilots at HIMSS Connected Health conference in November, including a general tablet for patient entertainment and education, an app for patients in the hospital for prostate screenings, and a remote patient monitoring app for post-surgical wound care. Finally, over the course of the year, hospitals continued to experiment with the boundaries of how much access a patient should have to his or her own data. In January, Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center received a $450,000 grant from The Commonwealth Fund to develop a program called OurNotes that allows patients to contribute to their medical records. The program is an extension of the well-known OpenNotes initiative and will include collaboration with a handful of other providers across the country. And in May, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) announced that they would offer an imaging app, called ImageInbox, to their patients. The app will help patients access digital versions of their imaging records, including MR, CT, ultrasound, and x-ray files. OpenNotes also received $10 million in new funding at the end of the year to expand its movement to 50 million patients over the next three years. The funding comes from the Cambia Health Foundation, the Gordon and Bettye Moore Foundation, the Peterson Center on Healthcare, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which originally funded the initiative five years ago. Trend: Chronic Condition Management This year number of health systems adopted connected devices aimed at helping users manage a particular chronic condition.  Partners HealthCare announced in April that it would partner with Samsung to create chronic condition management software. Partners plans to launch a clinical trial of the new software in June. Another partnership, with PatientsLikeMe, announced in May, will provide patients with access to PatientsLikeMe via the healthcare provider’s patient portal. As part of the deal, Partners’ Patient Gateway will connect patients into PatientsLikeMe’s system.  Other announcements centered on particular conditions. We’ve listed some of the most interesting ones below. Asthma/COPD The year was a big one for asthma and COPD digital health offerings, but the year actually started with one such company shutting down its spinoff due to lack of interest. Michigan’s integrated health system Spectrum Health announced at the end of the year that it would shut down Ideomed, a mobile health app developer that spun out of the provider in 2010.  According to a report in local business journal MiBiz, Spectrum pulled the plug after “tepid sales” and a lack of interest from outside investors. Ideomed had built an app called Abriiz aimed at asthma and COPD patients. Yet several other hospital services embarked on respiratory-related projects during the year. In March, LifeMap Solutions, a San Jose, California-based company, launched a new pilot with Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. LifeMap will team up with Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine and the National Jewish Health Respiratory Institute (NJHRI) to develop a COPD platform that includes both a mobile app and, down the road, a smart inhaler. Then in December, LifeMap launched its second app, COPD Navigator, for free in the app store. At the same time, it launched a branded, enterprise version of that app, called iBreathe, with chronic care management company SuperCare Health. In May, Aliso Viego, California-based Sentrian, the remote patient monitoring company formerly known as Jointly Health, announced that it would work with Scripps Translational Science Institute to study its technology on 2,000 patients with COPD. The Sentrian Remote Patient Intelligence platform uses biosensors to monitor patients remotely, but the company uses machine learning to customize the alert parameters for each patient. In December, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, a division of the National Institutes of Health, awarded a group of researchers from UCLA and USC $6 million to develop technology designed for children that predicts their asthma attacks. Researchers working on this project are a part of NIH's $144 million Pediatric Research Integrating Sensor Monitoring Systems (PRISMS) initiative. Matters of the heart Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston announced plans to pilot iGetBetter’s apps to reduce hospital readmissions through remote patient monitoring and post-discharge patient engagement. The pilot will target patients that have heart disease, specifically those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM).  Partners Healthcare teamed up with Daichii Sankyo to create a mobile app for atrial fibrillation patients taking oral anticoagulants from Daiichi Sankyo. The app will have the goal of improving medication adherence and compliance and improving patient-provider communication and feedback loops. Later in the year, the Scripps Translational Science Institute announced that it is working with Aetna and Johnson & Johnson to launch a trial that will test iRhythm's Zio Patch and the Amiigo activity tracker as possible new ways to screen at-risk populations for atrial fibrillation. In January, smartphone ECG company AliveCor announced the publication of a long-awaited independent trial of the technology conducted by the Cleveland Clinic. As was reported at Heart Rhythm Society in May 2014, the trial showed that AliveCor’s heart monitor detected atrial fibrillation that was present 100 percent of the time, and only returned false positives 3 percent of the time. Additionally, Utah health system Intermountain Healthcare — and other, as yet unknown providers — started investigating AliveCor’s smartphone ECG device in a clinical context, to determine whether the iPhone version of the device is comparable with traditional 12-lead ECGs. Tactio Health Group, a Montreal-based company that builds smartphone-connected remote patient monitoring devices, announced that it would run a 25-person pilot study with the University of Michigan Health System, studying the effects of pharmacist-led home blood pressure monitoring and medication reminders on people with hypertension. April was a big month for reducing readmissions for congestive heart failure. New York City-based Health Recovery Solutions announced that its tablet-based program reduced the 30-day readmission rate for 130 congestive heart failure (CHF) patients at Penn Medicine’s Penn Care at Home program by 53 percent. Then, in a pilot that included more than 350 CHF patients, a Philadelphia hospital was able to reduce its 30-day readmissions by 10 percent — a 40 percent improvement over baseline — by using email and text message reminders to get patients into follow-up appointments. Then a retrospective matched-pair cohort study of 348 patients in Partners HealthCare’s Boston-area hospitals showed that remote monitoring in congestive heart failure patients can reduce 120-day hospitalizations and mortality. Interestingly, while the reduction in mortality held beyond the 120 days of the study, the hospitalizations for the monitoring cohort actually went up after the monitoring stopped. Diabetes and Prediabetes New York City-based wellness app maker Noom and CityMD, a network of urgent care medical centers in and around New York City, launched a pilot for people who are at risk for Type 2 diabetes using Samsung's S Health app, integrated with Noom's health program. The pilot will include, at most, around 670 New Yorkers who have been diagnosed with prediabetes. Noom aims to use the pilot to create a health program that offers users preventive protocols and disease treatment therapies in near-real time. ClinicalTrails.gov also shed light on another digital health-focused trial from Noom. According to the posting, wellness app maker Noom will work with both the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital in New York and Kaiser Permanente on a 12-week, 200-person trial of a new mobile health app for eating disorders called Noom Monitor. Also this year, Joslin Diabetes Center started a small trial to pilot test a mobile health app and an online nutrition education platform for people with Type 1 diabetes. The web platform will help educate patients about how to optimize their glucose and analyze their after-meal behavior. The app will facilitate data logging to help patients and caregivers track and explain variability in their glucose readings. The system is called “Sugar Sleuth”. Another diabetes-related venture, this one from two American and two European companies, will aim to use near-field communication (NFC) technology to create new options for diabetes management. The Mayo Clinic and Washington, DC-based medical technology company Gentag formed the American half of the venture, while Dutch medical technology company NovioSense and German R&D firm Fraunhofer IMS will work on the problem in Europe. Both pairs of companies have collaborated in the past. Additionally, Livongo Health, the diabetes management startup launched last year by former Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman, announced this year that it would roll out its platform to a large group of New Yorkers via the Mount Sinai health system. The program, which has already been available to Mount Sinai employees, will now be available to patients in the Mount Sinai network. Finally, the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) began a pilot of an app, called Sugar, which aims to help people with diabetes manage their weight and blood sugar level as well as assess the status of chronic foot ulcers.   Weight Loss The CS Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan announced a new telemedicine program to help reduce childhood obesity. The hospital will work with Fruit Street, a recently-formed digital wellness and telemedicine platform, to provide a program for patients that integrates video visits with monitoring via wearable devices. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), awarded Providence's Miriam Hospital and Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center a $1.3 million grant so that researchers can conduct a mobile-enabled study to research weight loss after bariatric surgery. Researchers will use wristworn a health monitoring device, called ActiGraph, and smartphones to track food, physical activity, behavior, mood, hunger, and cravings for around 100 bariatric surgery patients. The researchers will track these patients before surgery and four times over the year after surgery. Other information researchers will collect include environmental factors, like foods available to patients and support from family and friends, to assess which factors predict weight loss. Trend: App curation and hospital app stores pop up As more and more mobile health apps have emerged in recent years, a perennial question is who will step up to help consumers figure out which health apps are worthwhile. This year we've started to see a trend of providers stepping into that role. The first two of these moves actually happened last year: Ochsner Health System in New Orleans made headlines when it launched the O Bar, the first “Genius Bar-type” in-person center for learning about health and wellness apps. By February the hospital had a roster of two to three hundred apps it’s recommending. The apps run the gamut from food and nutrition tracking, to fitness and activity, to apps that help manage chronic conditions like diabetes. Some help users quit smoking while others offer support and education to expectant mothers. And toward the end of last year, Morristown Medical Center, a part of the Atlantic Health System in New Jersey, opened up HealtheConnect, an on-site, physical store located just off the hospital’s main lobby where patients, family members, and medical professionals can learn about health apps and wearable devices. While the store is currently backed by the hospital's foundation, the longterm plan is to transition it into a business and revenue stream in its own right — in about a year’s time. In April, the Cleveland Clinic got in on the game when Cleveland Clinic Innovations, a business unit at the Cleveland Clinic, partnered with the Global Healthcare Innovations Alliance to launch a new e-commerce platform called ADEO. Through the website, both caregivers and patients will be able to purchase care tools, including a number of patient-facing mobile apps. The store quietly launched last October and now plays host to 13 products. Some non-provider organizations that were already offering app prescription platforms also made news during the year. In January, Palo Alto-based HealthTap released a ranking of health, wellness, and medical apps based on the public endorsements of thousands of doctors who use the HealthTap AppRx platform. Although not every doctor in HealthTap’s network participated and those that did, didn’t see all the apps, the system is designed to give each app equal exposure and to minimize bias on the part of physician reviewers. The top three consumer-facing iOS apps recommended by HealthTap doctors were MyFitnessPal, Weight Watchers, and Lose It! (in that order), while the Android list had Weight Watchers in the number one spot, followed by White Noise Lite and Lose It! once again at number three. White Noise Lite came in 4th on the iOS list, and The American Red Cross First Aid app and RunKeeper rounded out the top six and top five, respectively. In May, IMS Health, a multinational big data and analytics company, partnered with Quantia, developer of a web and mobile community for physicians. Through this partnership, Quantia provided the 225,000 members on its network with access to IMS’ app curation platform, AppScript. Quantia was later acquired by Physicians Interactive, now called Aptus Health, in July. And across the pond in England, both the NHS England and the Royal College of Physicians both made moves towards curating approved apps for patients. In March, NHS England launched a library of five approved apps on its NHS Choices website, which gets 40 million visits per month. Then in May the Royal College of Physicians of London, the professional organization that sets the standards of medical training in the UK, published a set of guidelines about how doctors there should use medical apps. The two-page guidance document places a heavy emphasis on the CE Mark, but also places the onus on doctors to use their own judgment in using apps in clinical practice. Finally, in November, the new Hacking Medicine Institute, a nonprofit that spun out of MIT this past summer, launched an initiative to produce reviews of mobile health apps and digital health tools. The vetting will be done by Harvard-affiliated physicians, and the venture will curate the mobile health app both for consumers and for providers looking to make recommendations about apps to patients. The group argues it will differ from past and current attempts at such an offering because the Hacking Medicine Institute, as an academically-rooted nonprofit, can be unbiased in a way companies like Happtique, IMS, or HealthTap can't be. Trend: Apple and Google court healthcare more directly Between an enterprise partnership with IBM, the continued integration of Apple HealthKit into hospitals, the announcement of ResearchKit, and even some early hospital pilots for the Apple Watch, Apple's footprint in healthcare was bigger this year than ever before. Google, meanwhile, continued to play around the edges of healthcare with moonshot projects from Verily (formerly Google X) and Google Glass which, though it may be on life support for consumers, still appears to have legs in healthcare enterprise. Many of Apple's healthcare launches this quarter build on plans announced last year: Apple's partnership with IBM to develop enterprise apps was announced last year, but only in the first quarter of 2015 did the companies unveil their first batch of healthcare apps. These include Hospital RN, which helps nurses manage patient information; Hospital Lead, an iPad app designed to help charge nurses manage the nursing staff; Hospital Tech, an iPhone app for connecting nurse technicians to the rest of the care team; and Home RN, an iPhone app for nurses working in patients’ homes or otherwise outside the hospital. In May, Apple added an Apple Watch extension to Hospital RN, with plans to do the same for other enterprise apps. Apple HealthKit, and its associated app Apple Health app, were also announced last year, at Apple's WWDC event. A big part of the initial announcement was integration with Epic which would allow a number of hospitals to make use of the data sharing platform. In February, a Reuters report asserted that at least 14 hospitals were either actively involved in a HealthKit pilot or in talks to roll one out, including Oschner Medical Center in New Orleans, Stanford Children’s Hospital, Penn Medicine, Duke University Hospital, Johns Hopkins, Mt. Sinai Hospital, and the Cleveland Clinic.  Just a few days later Stanford officially launched its patient-facing, HealthKit enabled iOS app. The new iOS 8 app, called MyHealth, allows patients to review test results and medical bills, manage prescriptions, schedule appointments, and conduct video visits with a Stanford physician, the latter via the hospital’s ClickWell Care telemedicine service. The Apple integration allows patients to upload vital signs and have them automatically and securely added to the patient’s chart in Epic. Later in the year, in April, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles took a new tack on HealthKit: opening up HealthKit functionality to all of its patients, and letting them tell doctors what data they want to share. Initially, any Cedars-Sinai patient who uses the Epic patient portal will be able to upload data from their devices to the weight, blood pressure, steps, pulse, glucose, and SpO2 fields in HealthKit and have that information sent to the EHR. More than 87,000 Cedars-Sinai patients are active users of the patient portal, and will now be able to integrate their health records with HealthKit. Apple did launch two new health-related products this year: the Apple Watch and Apple ResearchKit. Apple Watch launched with as many as 264 health and wellness-related apps, but also began to be used here and there in hospital pilots. Two of those focus on cancer: the MedoPad Apple Watch app being used at King's College Hospital in London and Southern New Jersey’s MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper, which set up a program for 30 of its breast cancer patients that equips them with Apple Watches to help them self-manage their treatment as well as stay better connected to their care team and each other. The center is working with Wayne, Pennsylvania-based behavioral health technology company Polaris Health Directions on the nine-month feasibility study, which will move into a Phase 2, randomized control trial if it goes well. And Ochsner Health System in New Orleans, which already has a HealthKit integration and a genius bar-style app and device store for patients, also launched an Apple Watch pilot. The watch will be given to high blood pressure patients, who will use it for medication reminders as well as using the Watch’s built-in fitness software to remind them to get enough exercise each day. Chief Clinical Transformation Officer Richard Milani told Forbes he plans to recruit two dozen patients and use the rest of Ochsner’s existing HealthKit program as a control group to collect data about the effectiveness of the Watch specifically. In March, Apple announced a new, open source platform for medical research cal

The final quarter of 2015 brought eight more digital health acquisitions, plus some larger scale acquisitions that could have reverberations throughout the world of digital health.

GI Logic has received FDA 510(k) clearance for a novel device that noninvasively monitors the digestive system after patients have surgery.

According to StartUp Health’s year-end report, digital health funding is down from 2014.

While interest in remote patient monitoring is very high and various kinds of programs are being deployed, the market is still maturing in many ways, according to a new report from Chilmark Research.

OpenNotes, the initiative that launched in 2010 to encourage doctors to open up their clinical notes to their patients, has received $10 million in new funding to expand its movement to 50 million patients over the next three years.

Digital health and wellness is where digital banking was two years ago, according to a new report from Apigee, which surveyed 1,000 smartphone owners 18 years of age or older in the United States.