Healthcare Social Media: What Can We Learn from a Fork? Or 8 Reasons for Slow Control to Succeed.

In the first few days of the New Year, we are always smothered in summaries, insights, and perspectives on the year past and the trends to come, especially in the fast-moving area of digital communication.  What and who will succeed on the web, in Social Media, in Mobile Apps? What's going up? What's coming down? You get the picture. But, to my mind, there is only one question? When will healthcare "get it" in a major and concrete way?  When will digital healthcare play as much of a role in as many people's lives as say e-commerce ? The answer is Marketing 101: when what people want, the products, and the business models are aligned. We aren't there yet. Where I'm going with this, is that some innovations do speed forward with less effort than others. And herein lies my story about the potential success of Slow Control, a company -- which in all transparency has been a client since 2012. Their first product, a digital fork branded as the HapiFork, has been unveiled at the Las Vegas Consumer Show. This fork vibrates when the user eats faster than he's supposed to and it generates graphs of the user's eating speed. Why set up such a system? Because eating too fast is unhealthy and conversely "eating slowly" has various health benefits on digestion, metabolism, weight management. We are seeing an extraordinary amount of interest in this internet-connected fork, the concept of "eating slowly for better health"...
Source: Denise Silber's eHealth - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Tags: eHealth Health 2.0 Quantified Self Source Type: blogs