CES 2024 – Day 3 – Healthy and Cooking

Digital health – Even fewer sensors.

• Digital Health has been quieter than usual this year and with very little progress on sensors to reliably measure critical health data, it is not hard to understand why.
• Beyond blood oxygenation (pretty easy) and pulse (also easy), blood pressure and blood glucose are two health markers that billions of people need to monitor but can only be reliably done with invasive procedures.
• That being said, the advent of continuous glucose monitors is a major step forward, but they are invasive (albeit minimally) and expensive to use at around $40 per week.
• Hence, there is still a huge market in waiting for anyone who can use a non-invasive sensor to measure this but still after more than 7 years of waiting, I have seen very little progress.
• At most CES shows one can find any number of companies who are using light-based sensors to measure blood pressure and blood glucose but this year there are even fewer than usual.
• Valencell, which has long been one of my hopefuls for blood pressure, has gone into hiding with no stand and the product it is showing in its suite is the same as the one that it showed last year.
• In Eureka Park where one can usually find any number of startups making this claim, there are only two both of which come from Asia.
• The first is called Accurate Meditech from Taiwan which uses a combination of two physical pressure sensors and an optical sensor on a 5cm by 3cm device to measure blood flow (and hence blood pressure) through the wrist.
• I have not seen this approach before, but the company says it has FDA approval for over-the-counter sales to the US consumer where the device will cost $200 and go on sale later this year.
• The other is a tiny startup from Singapore which uses an optical sensor to measure blood glucose, but the demonstration did not pass the smell test and where the measurements were very variable and far from convincing.
• With fewer sensors and no good demos, it looks like we are as far as ever from non-invasive blood pressure and blood glucose monitoring.
• I have been waiting for more than 7 years for this and at this rate this is starting to look like a retirement project.

AI Cooking – Middling cook, Bad chef

• No trip to CES is complete without a tour of the food tech section and here AI-powered robotic chefs are all the rage this year.
• From a robot that makes cocktails, another that can make Chinese stir-fries to another that makes dishes to order in an ordinary kitchen, the aim is to remove humans from food and beverage preparation with AI.
• If the dataset of ingredients was both static and finite then humans would very soon be out of the kitchen but, as usual, this is not the case.
• Each ingredient like a tomato, an egg, a piece of meat etc is different every single time it is used which is one reason why humans are equipped with an extremely sophisticated sensor and an algorithm that allows the dish to be adjusted once the recipe has been completed.
• This is why every recipe says “season to taste” at the end because the volatility of ingredients means that adjustment is almost always needed to make a great-tasting dish.
• The robot chefs lack both the sensor and the algorithm to make these adjustments meaning that every dish made by a robot is almost always going to be mediocre at best.
• For things that are more formulaic like baking basic loaves of bread or brewing beer robots have a better chance, but even the best bread machines can’t get remotely close to what a half-competent baker can achieve with the same ingredients.
• Despite these limitations, I think that there is a market for these types of products as it is becoming clearer that the obesity crisis is at least partially caused by the ready-made food products that dominate almost all supermarket shelves.
• The first cure for this is to prepare food from scratch at home with fresh ingredients but almost all consumers will say that they don’t have time for this.