In the latest episode of Impetus Digital‘s Fireside Chat series, I sat down with Scott McMillan, CEO of XCO, for a discussion around wearable technologies for chronic and acute disease monitoring, virtual trials, and assessment of athlete performance. Among other things, we explored the role of AI in processing and analyzing data and Scott shared his predictions for the future of wearables and digital health.
Below is a sneak peek of our discussion:
Q: What gaps did you find or what was the impetus, if you will, that propelled you to say, “You know what? I want to start my own thing. I think there’s a need”?
A: Good question. You know, I was pretty fortunate that I graduated from university in the mid-90s, and really that’s when the internet took off. Of course, we had a bit of a bust, it’s been up and down, but at the same time because of my background and that education and the jobs, I got very much into sensor technology and how to better assess people. I have a great fascination for creating and using assessment technologies to glean new insights into health and performance. That’s what gets me excited: when we can come up with something new to discover and understand the body better.
For a number of years, it wasn’t very popular. The internet, of course, was the popular place to grow companies. It wasn’t until the iPhone really became popular and when you could link devices to it. Then since 2010, we’ve been in this huge growth of wearables and seeing how wearables have grown in the sensor space, and how medical devices now are advancing in the same way. What we saw was there was just a lack of access to good assessment. You had to go to a clinic, or a hospital, or a university to get a proper assessment done, and those systems cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. We believed all that technology would soon be accessible to just about anybody in their home, and that’s exactly where we are now today. We’ve seen that with COVID accelerating the adoption of technology in the home and out of hospitals…
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Scott McMillan, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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