A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

For well over a decade, wearable technologies have been developed for humans from head-to-toe — from forehead-worn bands to address stress and headaches to smart shoes with sensor-embedded soles that assess our gait and posture. In 2013, my CES coverage had a focus on “The Battle of the (Wrist)Bands.” This year, the #wearabletech category feels like a fierce competition for the human real estate of the finger — that is, a battle of the smart rings. Twelve years later, smartwatches are mainstream trackers for health embedded with sensors that are gaining clinical evidence for use in medical care well beyond

Increasingly, people are engaging more in health care decision making due to many factors impacting their personal medical choices — from the cost and access to health insurance to co-payments for prescription drugs and the supply of primary care doctors, more patients developed and exercised their health consumer muscles in 2025, For 2026, the health consumer muscle-building will grow as people will be re-shaped by macro market factors we are currently gleaning from forecasts looking into the new year: for personal finances, social issues, technology adoption, views on AI and privacy, and other issues. Here are some data points to

From GLP-1s to longevity and new views on self-care for healthcare, the people are taking their health in-hand, at-home, and via-tech to complement and sometimes replace the legacy health system touchpoints which are the traditional categories for care: hospitals, doctors, rehab centers, diagnostics and labs, and health care financing and plans — some opting out of plans and going full-risk (cash, out-of-pocket) truly self-insuring against future medical risks. As I prepare to publish my Year-End/New Year TrendCast for 2026, I felt like front-ending next week’s annual long post with details on the demand side of the forecast — a focus

Enthusiasm for innovation is not a guaranteed thing; furthermore, trust in AI lags trust in the overall technology sector, we find in the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer research through a Flash Poll: Trust and Artificial Intelligence at a Crossroads, discussed in a webcast on 3 December. People in the U.S. are more than twice as likely to reject the growing use of AI than embrace it, with the embrace of AI much lower than peoples’ enthusiasm for it. Edelman conducted the poll in five countries — Brazil, China, Germany, the UK and the US — with sample sizes at least 1,000+

Cost is a leading reason why people say they could not obtain the fertility care they need. But the costs of IVF and other forms of fertility care lie within a larger home economics framework of family-building and -raising.             The context and costs of raising a child in America. Consider the layers of a household budget starting with the home’s “macro”-economics of income. Then within that circle, especially in the U.S., the factor of whether that household is covered by employer-sponsored health insurance. The next layer of more health micro-economics in the family is the

In his latest book, Notes on Being a Man, Scott Galloway discusses his personal fertility journey in the larger social context of what it means to be a man in modern America. Galloway’s infertility challenges shared with his wife inform his views on men’s health across all dimensions — physical, mental health, social health, financial well-being — and how, of course, men’s overall health is also a women’s and children’s issue. Men can feel “left out” of infertility discussions, based on results from the first and largest multi-national study into men’s feelings about their infertility revealed. “How men feel about

Today, 1 November, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was to be shuttered and unfunded in at least 25 states until the U.S. Congress agreed to re-open the Federal government and fund this safety net for food security that covers 42 million people in America. Those 42 million people included 16 million children, about 39% of SNAP program beneficiaries. Then last night, a Federal judge intervened to order President Trump’s administration to reinstate funding for food assistance just-in-time. At this moment, I cannot tell you what the exact timing nor the amounts beneficiaries will receive will be.      

One of the only uniting factors in U.S. health care across political parties is that most of the nation’s health citizens, cross-party ID, trust doctors and their professional associations for reliable information on vaccines. Pediatricians in particular are mostly-trusted for vaccine facts, according to the KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Tylenol-Autism Link and Vaccine Policies, the latest in the Kaiser Family Foundation’s series on Health Information and Trust Tracking Polls.             The biggest trust-chasm when it comes to sources for vaccine information is Americans’ split views on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary

Over one million children around the world have played with an MRI building set from LEGO, which has reduced the young patients’ feelings of anxiety pre-scan along with reducing levels of need for anaesthesia to prep for the MRI procedure, according to the company’s October 13 press release.             The LEGO MRI set is a project of The LEGO Foundation and its commitment to ESG — Environmental, Societal, and Governance goals. “Since 2023, more than 10,000 LEGO MRI Scanner sets have been donated to hospitals and health professionals around the world as part of the LEGO