This week’s Sydney Morning Herald is trumpeting the “quantified self” fitness trend, highlighting Resmed’s plans to work with the likes of Apple, Jawbone, and Fitbit in an effort to make new electronic gadgets.
According to the Herald, Resmed CEO Mick Farrell told a medical conference down under that Resmed “wanted to make personal products that can monitor consumers’ health signs, like heart and respiratory rate and how well they are sleeping.”
Speaking at Ausmedtech in Melbourne, Farrell said the consumer-focused product would use technology from an acquisition that Resmed made in July 2011 of a Dublin-based start-up called BiancaMed. Herald reporter Jessica Gardner writes that the start-up was established by PhD students who had created a device “half the size of my iPhone” that could measure heart and respiratory rate over a short distance. “We’re going to take that sensor and put it in a consumer device,” said Farrell at the conference.
“Farrell said the company was looking for a consumer electronics company to make a device, which would be powered by Resmed’s technology – in the same way that chip processor Intel powers computers,” writes Gardner. “As well as monitoring consumers’ health and sleep patterns, the technology could be incorporated into an alarm that could wake them at an ideal time each morning.”
Farrell reportedly attended the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas where there was a large room dedicated to sleep consumer products. “We think there’s something in this,” he said. “We want to win this space but we also love the fact that everyone else is talking about it.”
The Herald reports that analyst Andrew Goodsall is calling consumer sleep products “the next frontier” for “companies like Resmed and its competitors Respironics. “There’s an opportunity for more of a direct to consumer type model where the consumer is prepared to pay,” he said.
