It’s that time of year! Join us for the next eight days for what’s become an OurCrowd tradition: highlighting during Hanukkah — the festival of lights – the top eight Israeli tech trends that spark the interest of our investment team and what they see on the ground.
Trend #8: Mobile Health
Behind the trend:
For years, the business of health care has been the focus of much debate in the US. As costs of medical care increase, quality of patient care hasn’t followed suit. More and more individuals are looking to preventative care as a way of avoiding costly procedures and unnecessary medication. Naturally, greater availability of personal mobile devices make it so individuals can more easily take charge of their own well-being, from wireless-enabled wearable technology devices and sensors like Fitbit to personal fitness training apps and data trackers for smartphones.
What’s up next:
Mobile health, or mHealth, is all about the apps, and Israel is at the cutting edge of mobile health technologies. The industry in Israel has seen quite a growth spurt in recent years as Israeli entrepreneurs are creating world class digital health startups.
Many of these startups were showcased at the mHealth Israel Conference last year, such as contest winner Medivizor, which helps people coping with serious or chronic illness get cutting-edge, reliable, health information that matters most; mPharma, a startup that provides real-time data on physician’s prescriptions and patient drug consumption for governments and pharmaceutical companies in Africa; and Myndlift, who provides a drug-free solution to improve concentration ability using mobile and wearable technology.
“We’re going to see more of an interchange between technologies, such as smart devices, and health care delivery. It is happening now,” says endocrinologist, geriatrician, and author Dr. Saralyn Mark in a recent U.S. News & World Report article. As Mark mentions, we already have devices and mobile apps to let us know when it’s time to take our medications, but coming up is smarter technology with advanced algorithms that could take the place of a pharmacist, for instance, in advising us of contraindications or warning us about side effects.
Even better, personalized, data-driven prevention apps will allow us to care for ourselves so that we won’t need medications in the first place. Sweetch, for instance, is a game-changing platform out of Israel that predicts personal diabetes risk with up to 7x more accuracy than clinical evaluation (and another mHealth finalist). That said, increased use of mobile devices will certainly drive up privacy concerns about the risk of data breaches, so mobile security is going to play a role in this trend, as well.
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Over this past week, for each night of Hanukkah we posted about a hot new tech trend sparking up the Startup Nation. 2015 was a record-breaking year for Israel’s startup ecosystem and we look forward to seeing what the next year will bring us in terms of amazing tech trends.
Be sure to check in with us again next year for OurCrowd’s 2016 Hanukkah tech trend roundup!
P.S.- If waiting until Hanukkah 2016 is too long and you need your tech trend fix now, check out all the top Israel technology trends from this holiday season.
To find out more about innovative technologies and investment opportunities on our platform, contact our Investor Relations team or visit our website.
