Now that CES 2025 is over, certain trends have become clear.
While the exhibition floor was full of wearables, panels featured conversations about sleep devices and vision and home health. These talks often centered on artificial intelligence (AI) and innovative treatments like regenerative medicine and digital therapeutics.
We stopped by several booths to give you a roundup of some of the digital health themes at CES 2025. Here’s what execs told us.
These answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Diogo Rau, chief information and digital officer, Eli Lilly
You can’t spell CES without “consumer,” of course. The biggest tech trend is just around all of the consumer engagement with healthcare.
For us in this industry, we are finally starting to pay attention to consumers directly. We’ve always cared about patients and people taking our medicines, but we have not made an effort to engage with consumers directly. That’s what’s changing, and this is not an experiment. This is a fundamental change, and we’re going to see that across every company in the medicines industry over the next 10 years. And I would even say the ones that don’t do that are probably not going to make it to the next 10 years.
Amelia Hay, VP of startup programming and investments, AARP Innovation Labs
AI and robotics actually are fairly big for digital health…Age tech crosses a lot of [different] sectors because really, we are focused on the aging population, but aging is living, so our solutions are geared toward a lot of different things: digital health, Big Tech, social engagement, mobility, accessibility, brain health.
Being at CES and having this presence with thought leadership on one side, startups on the other…I mentioned robotics earlier, and I actually think that it is something that could disrupt how we’re taking care of older people. Not only that, but also using it to help people do things longer—like exoskeletons, walking longer.…I believe that robotic technology, or exoskeleton technology, is actually going to improve a lot of things for older people when we look into the future.
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There’s so much AI out there, and what I think the benefit of AI for the aging population is that you can take the data and use it to predict. You can have a certain population—let’s say, Alzheimer’s patients—using something or gathering the data. But AI can synthesize it so that you can then begin to use it. People pre-diagnosis are showing the same types of behavior…I really feel like the predictive aspect is a huge benefit for the aging population.
Bipin Patel, CEO and founder, electronRx
I see lots of sports bicycles everywhere. I see vast numbers of rings that you can wear. We see vast amounts of tracking, monitoring tools; lots look like they are all targeted at informing the user of some metric. We see quite a bit of these tools being dropped into what appears to be issues around sleep. But it feels like there’s an overwhelming amount of tools and kit equipment that you are expected to purchase. And I think almost 99% of them—if not 99.9%—are connected through the mobile phone into an app that then gives you some sort of a readout, which I think the user then has to find out what that really means.…So then I begin to ask the question: What is it that you’re actually selling to the user? I think you’re giving bits of information that you cannot act on because you don’t know what to do with it.