There’s less talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency at #CES2020. The most important currency under discussion is Trust.

We have begun a consumer electronics migration from the past decade of the Internet of Things to this next decade of the Intelligence of Things. The different “I’s” signal the transition from devices that have connected to the Internet and generated data from our everyday lives, to the next ten years of gathering that data, mashing it up for meaning, and feeding back intelligence to users in the form of advising, coaching, nudging — with potentially powerful feedback loops for health, wellness and self-care.

But to be “Intelligent,” this V2.0 era of the IoT needs lots of data to feed the AI machine, and much of that information quite personal and largely un-related to the purely medical.

Several consumer surveys published to coincide with CES 2020 provide insights into the new consumer trust mindset across industries, but especially important for health engagement.

The Digital Health Summit at CES collaborated with Kantar on a poll gauging peoples’ perspectives on trust, technology and health. Only one in 3 Americans think there are proper safeguards in place protecting the privacy of their personal health information, the first chart illustrates from Kantar’s survey of over 1,000 U.S. adults conducted in November 2019. While most consumers say technology enables us to be connected with our health care, trust is a barrier to digital engagement. Six in ten people told Kantar that privacy concerns like data breaches prevent them from using wearable tracking devices or using telemedicine services.

Still, consumers increasingly appreciate that trading off personal data can have benefits and in a value-exchange. Dassault Systèmes survey released this week found that consumers are most interested in personalized products and services that benefit health — like preventing the onset of disease based on personal behavior changes, and predicting and preventing falls. This also links to personalization for safety at home. While valuing personalization for health and wellness, nearly 100% of consumer are worried about data privacy and would only share data in exchange for personalized services in return. These concerns vary by generation, Dassault found: Boomers and older people are less likely to be comfortable sharing data for personalization compared with Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z consumers.

As voice tech and sensors have begun to permeate all physical spaces of our lives, the car is becoming a third space for health after our homes and workplaces.

“The car is becoming the hub for AI,” Marc Naddell of Gyrfalcon Technologies told Sasha Lekach of Mashable this week. “Everything can be learned by the vehicle,” from helping the driver be safer….or detecting when she’s drunk or sleepy.

Connected cars are being developed for health and wellness applications, so it behooves us to understand how people feel about the trustworthiness of sharing their data with their autos. Over one-half of car owners believe their data could be used in negative ways. ENGINE Insights polled over 2,000 auto owners in November 2019 and revealed that. “Trust is a major issue between auto manufacturers and their consumers,” with trust varying by car brand. Specifically, Toyota was the most-trusted brand at 20%, followed by Honda, Chevrolet, and Ford and Lexus tied for fifth place at 14%. ENGINE folks pointed out that, while Tesla vehicles are among the most tech-sophisticated cars on the market, their trust score was a mere 3%.

Tech-privacy-convenience trade-offs were also gauged in Morning Consult’s national tracking poll conducted in December 2020. Two in three consumers say the benefits of tech companies “aren’t worth the industry’s becoming more powerful at the expense of smaller companies.” One-half of people believe the tech industry has “a lot” of power just behind politicians and finance. These stats demonstrate consumers’ “concerned embrace” of technology I’ve noted here in Health Populi and in my book, HealthConsuming,

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  As health care gets smarter based on the adoption of AI (artificial intelligence), driven by faster communication networks and distributed computing that gathers our personal data from hither, thither and yon sources, consumers are valuing the potential benefits of personalization in daily life and especially in health/care.

Most consumers, in fact, identified technology companies as the source of the most health care innovation 20 years from now in a RealClear Politics poll conducted last year, which I’ve been citing in my talks with healthcare industry players in pharma, biotech, hospitals and health plan organizations. As people think about healthcare delivered 20 years from now, most people think it’s the tech industry that will improve the quality of care in America — moreso than biotech, hospitals, Democrats, or pharmaceutical companies will do.

Peoples’ “trust equity” with tech is mixed — there’s tremendous faith and hope for technology to improve health care. But in the post Facebook/Cambridge Analytica era of social networks and fake news mainstreaming, people grow weary and concerned about how much, who, and when to trust tech.

And Trust is a precursor to peoples’ health engagement, we learned in the first Edelman Health Engagement Barometer study conducted in 2008. As the last bar chart shows, it’s trust that’s a most important factor in health engagement, followed by authenticity and satisfaction.

In 2019, people in America ranked the most honest and ethical occupations in the nation as nurses (#1 for the 18th year in a row), pharmacists and doctors (along with engineers) in this annual Gallup Poll.

Health consumers will carefully balance their tech-love and demand for quality, personalized health care with their concerned embrace of tech and trust in front-line healthcare workers. For each of us, personalized health care will be our own optimal mix of high tech, high touch, our values and our willingness to pay in terms of both our money and our data.