An IoT expert talks about what works and what doesn't work in the rapidly-growing world of sensor technology

Amanda Pedersen

When it comes to developing sensor-based products, it's okay to get a bit crazy, as long as the end product conforms to five guiding design principals. At least, that's what Mark Bachman, an Internet of Things (IoT) Evangelist, and a professor at the University of California Irvine, tells his students.

At MD&M West, Bachman, who also is director of the eHealth Collaboratory at UC Irvine's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), shared eHealth's guiding design principals for sensor-based health technology, along with other tips for making sensors that make sense in today's world.

Those principals are: 

"The traditional model of healthcare is not sustainable," Bachman said, adding that technology can empower patients to participate in their own care.

Different types of health sensors have a different level of difficulty, risk level, and production cost, Bachman said. The most difficult, risky, and expensive type of sensor to make are implantable sensors, he said, but those are also the sensors that provide the highest value. An example of an implantable sensor is one that his team is currently working on that is the size of an eyelash and is designed to be implanted into a human eye to measure intraocular pressure.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Bachman said a device designed to measure environmental factors, such as air quality, is relatively simple and inexpensive to make, but provides less value.

Other sensor types fall between implantable and environmental, listed in order from most to least difficult, include: semi-implantable (such as a capsule endoscopy device), wearable, handheld, and interactive.

The most popular category of sensors today are clearly wearable sensors, but Bachman cautioned the audience against making a wearable sensor-based product designed to track heart rate or lifestyle activity, as that market is pretty well saturated already. There is still a significant market opportunity for wearable sensors, he said, "if we move away from lifestyle sensors."

One example of a wearable sensor device that provides value but doesn't fall into the lifestyle monitoring category, Bachman said, is a product from a startup called TinyKicks Inc. that is designed to monitor fetal activity as an indicator of how healthy a baby is during pregnancy. Another example of a wearable sensor that goes beyond lifestyle activity monitoring, he said, is a device that monitors sweat from a company called Eccrine Systems Inc.

[Image courtesy of Pixabay]