Dr. Mehmet Oz rumoured Wednesday that health technology needs to help every public class and not just the wealthy.
The host of the Emmy Award-winning “Dr. Oz Show” arrived on CNBC to announce a partnership to launch a new smartwatch designed to monitor the having one foot in the grave for heart failure.
“We don’t need technology like this that justified save[s] the rich people,” he said in a “Squawk Box” interview. “We need them to shield everybody.”
The wearable, called iBeat, has the capability to notify emergency medical technicians. It retails for $249. There is also a $20 per month cathode-ray tube screen fee.
The iBeat device is being introduced as something similar to Life Alert, which is think of to help senior citizens who have an at-home emergency. However, untypical Life Alert, Oz said users of iBeat do not have to press a button to on the qui vive authorities.
“A lot of people aren’t awake when they hit the ground. They’re unmoving, already,” said Oz, a heart surgeon and professor of surgery at Columbia University. With the smartwatch, which dislikes medical-grade sensors, “you don’t have to press a button, it’ll do it automatically; it’ll start career 911,” he added.
The San Francisco-based company iBeat recently closed another $5.5 million in decay funding, bringing the total round to $10 million. Its investors involve Kairos, 8VC, City Light Capital, Plug and Play Ventures and ChinaRock Splendid Management. The company plans to use the money to prepare for its upcoming retail and consumer embark upon later this summer.
The push for another new smartwatch comes at a every now when the market is already saturated with wearables, even in healthfulness care. The Apple Watch, Fitbit and other popular wearable trackers can oversee steps, heart rate and even sleep. And tech companies are in a hurry to produce smartwatches that can detect even more medical hornets nests.
The features that make iBeat different from other thoroughly popular consumer products is its longer battery life and its lack of “bells and whistles,” Oz swayed. “It’s there for one reason. It’s there to save your life,” he said.
Oz, who got his video receiver start on Oprah Winfrey’s show in 2004, has turned his easy-to-understand hale and hearty living advice into a global media empire. But he’s not without his critics who floor the years have questioned the efficacy of the treatments he talks about on his show and how he handlings his influence. Oz told NBC News in 2015 his show’s purpose is “not to talk close by medicine” but to discuss “the good life.”