The interest in wearables for healthcare applications goes well beyond the realm of pharmaceutical companies, health systems and employer wellness companies. Well before we see self-driving cars come into mainstream use, Ford is interested in the convergence of wearables and cars and has set up an Wearables Experience Lab to experiment with potential applications.
The lab is evaluating fitness devices currently on the market and testing them using a driving simulator.
In an interview with Fortune, Gary Strumolo, global manager for vehicle design and infotronics for Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, said:
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“Our focus now is really on how we enable a driver to interact with the car in a valuable way…And that’s by making sure people are conscious of their conditions so they can make good decisions when they’re operating the vehicle.”
Strumolo noted that health data sent to the car in the future would use be used at the time that it’s needed and wouldn’t be stored.
One of Ford’s partners in the health tech space is Tome, an Internet of Things technology company in the StartUp Health Academy. Its founders, Massimo Baldini and Jake Sigal, previously founded Livio, which Ford acquired in 2013 to allow communication between smartphone apps and its cars.
Given that automatic braking is a mainstream feature of many cars, it will be interesting to see how Ford’s vision of wearable tech applications for cars will pan out. A few companies are interested in giving people with epilepsy advance warning of an attack and diabetics sufficient warning to avoid a hypoglycemic attack.
A Personalized Approach to Medication Nonadherence
At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
Maybe a car could alert people in danger of falling asleep if they at the wheel by tracking the position of their head or eye movement.
Photos: Ford Media Center
