HealthTech and SportsTech Applications: Stepping up AI Capabilities with Investments in 2024

Health technology or HealthTech AI trends in the last five years majorly reveal the growing dominance of cloud computing, digital therapeutics, and robotics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed the rise of many cutting-edge AI-driven applications such as remote patient monitoring and remote care platforms, personalized medicine, and AR / VR devices for tracking patient health. The recent investments have influenced HealthTech AI trends, speeding up healthcare services. Today, fitness tracker manufacturing companies are working with leading healthcare organizations, insurance providers, pharma companies, and e-commerce platforms to mine, analyze, and engineer structured and unstructured data. Without AI, working with these massive volumes of data will take decades to decipher. In our attempt to understand the role of AI in healthtech transformation, we sat down with Elevate Ventures, CEO, Christopher “Toph” Day.

Christopher is the Chief Visionary for Rally, the largest cross-sector innovation conference.  He is an innovator, entrepreneur, business creator, community builder, job maker, and wealth creator throughout his endeavors over the last 30 years having co-founded eight businesses in seven different sectors with multiple exits to Fortune 500 companies. He has led companies across multiple sectors including artificial intelligence, SaaS, hardtech, broadband, entertainment, investment banking, and real estate.

Here’s what he revealed to our in-house AI journalist, Pooja, during the AiThority Interview Series.

Hi, Christopher. Welcome to the AiThority Interview Series. Please tell us about Elevate Ventures.

Elevate Ventures is the top-ranked seed and early-stage venture capital firm in the Great Lakes Region and Top 5 in the United States.

We invest in ideation, seed, and Series A portions of the funding journey and provide mentorship and resources to empower entrepreneurs in building and scaling their businesses. My role is to support our team and portfolio companies so they can do their best work while advocating for tech growth in our region. Elevate is also launching a new global cross-sector innovation conference, Rally, which will bring together founders and investors from across the globe, focused on healthtech, sports tech, ag & food, software, and more.

As a major investor in innovative startups, how do you see the impact of AI shaping the landscape of entrepreneurship and investment?

AI has been the top investment theme this year.

Companies must recognize the significance of embracing AI capabilities. It’s not just about defending against emerging AI startups but also disrupting established giants, recruiting the right talent, and adopting AI today to prevent major pivots down the road. Determining how to take these steps is fundamental to a company’s survival.

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It is also critical that founders cut through the noise in AI for what is real and what is hype. Some don’t fully appreciate the actual use cases for new emerging tools and believe they solve problems they were never intended to solve. In addition, AI is applied to tools that are merely sophisticated BI (Business Intelligence). Misusing these terms can lead to a lack of credibility.

As an experienced founder and investor, what advice would you give to startups or entrepreneurs looking to leverage AI?

Especially at the startup stage, founders must engage with others outside their immediate silos.

Today’s discussion revolves around AI, but the next disruptive wave remains uncertain.

That’s why we’re fostering collaboration among experts with diverse skill sets to tackle these pressing challenges head-on. In my experience as a founder, I had the most success when I engaged with others across sectors to understand how they were solving problems – knowledge I then applied to my businesses.

With the increasing popularity of wearable and mobile devices like fitness trackers and heart monitors, there’s a massive influx of data in the healthtech sector. How do you think AI is going to step up to the plate and handle this data deluge?

There’s no question that AI is required to maximize the use of the torrent of health data. We need seamless integration with AI capabilities, which will require strong collaboration among software and materials engineers, hard tech experts, and clinicians. Embracing a multidisciplinary, cross-sector approach to product development will determine the success of the next healthtech company, not only in reaching the minimum viable product stage but also in achieving broader market adoption. The ability to harness the power of AI in tandem with expertise from various fields will pave the way for further advancements in healthcare tech.

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Could you give us some real-life examples of how AI is currently being utilized to inform and benefit fitness enthusiasts and patients in the healthtech industry?

Almost everyone is familiar with the wearable fitness tracker – be it an Apple Watch, Fitbit, or another brand. Such devices straddle the line of healthtech and sports technology (sportstech), often using AI to provide insights based on the near-constant inputs of pulse, movement, steps, and sleep. As for AI’s clinical use, I’ve seen exciting research using machine learning models to diagnose and inform treatment for acute respiratory illness, with the potential to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics.

As an AI advocate, what are some key challenges and opportunities you see in leveraging AI for healthtech applications?

Two that stand out are privacy and bias. Data should be anonymized, encrypted, and available only to the systems requiring it for analysis. Healthtech companies must also be transparent about how they collect, use, and share patient or consumer data. To guard against bias, AI must be trained on diverse datasets. Companies should disclose how their models make decisions to provide transparency to users and allow companies to monitor the algorithms for unintended bias or consequences.

In the SportsTech industry, what AI applications have caught your attention as particularly exciting or promising?

I expect to see a surge in leveraging AI to analyze athlete performance data to create even more personalized training plans. This extends to scouting and recruitment through analysis of in-game video footage.

How do you envision AI-driven health and performance data enhancing the experience and outcomes for athletes and sports enthusiasts?

Ultimately, it comes down to giving individuals, teams, and fans more access to information to improve performance, make better training and fitness decisions, or have a more engaging viewing experience. Teams at both the professional and collegiate levels will use AI-powered tech to help develop players, identify opponent weaknesses, and make their sports even more engaging and immersive to fans, especially those watching from home.

Thank you, Christopher! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.

[To share your insights with us as part of editorial or sponsored content, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]