Philips lights the way to future health

Psoriasis is a worldwide epidemic. Some 125 million people suffer from it globally, and in the Philippines it afflicts about 1 to 2 million who seek relief, if not a cure.

That’s where Philips can make a difference.

At the Philips Innovation Experience held in The Netherlands, we saw a new product that relieves the pain of psoriasis. BlueControl is a wearable device that administers LED light locally to afflicted skin areas, relieving the symptoms at the source by 50 percent in clinical trials. It emits a glowing, Avatar-like UV-free light that’s said to slow down rapid cell division and reduce inflammation in sufferers.

It’s just one of the new health and lighting devices Philips presented to the media recently at its Philips Innovation Experience event in Eindhoven, Philips’ birthplace.

Others include:

• Home blood tests with results ready in 10 minutes.

• Home air purifiers that you can set by remote control, using your mobile phone.

• Personalized office light settings with the flick of a finger on your tablet.

• Apps that recognize when you’re in the supermarket, and alert you to your product preferences.

The future, indeed, looks bright, according to Philips CEO Frans Van Houten, who gave the keynote address and sought to explain a radical shift in the Dutch company’s structure: just a week before, the company had announced its core business would be divided into two standalone companies: Lighting and HealthTech. In the process, costs will be cut over the next year, unprofitable divisions will be sold off, and Philips will put all its chips into future cities.  

Future cities? Well, yes, and most of those will be Asia, with its rapidly expanding growth centers. 

Philips is redesigning its own future, in hopes that more people will redesign their own, through a raft of new health gadgets and lighting solutions.

It’s a big step for a company with a 138-year history of innovations — everything from light bulbs and x-ray machines to radio tubes and televisions — and an equally restless history of shedding products it no longer finds profitable.
The move is strategic, since health and lighting are the best-performing aspects of the Philips business, but also because health products are in demand among a fast-aging demographic throughout Asia.

Thus, perhaps, the gathering of 98 journalists from Southeast Asia — but also from disparate places such as Israel, Pakistan, Ghana and other faraway markets — in remote Eindhoven at the Evoluon, a 1960s-era Philips tech lab that resembles the spaceship from The Day the Earth Stood Still and, on event day, resembled a high-tech dance club inside.

Van Houten outlined the company’s new mission statement: “To lead a good life, consumers want to monitor and manage their health, be it the air they breathe, the food they eat or their personal hygiene.” They also want “safer, more comfortable cities,” and that’s where Philips Lighting plans to lead.

First, the HealthTech. We saw a raft of new products on display, aimed at a more “holistic” approach to healthcare: consumers will learn to diagnose their own pain and symptoms and administer healthy treatments through personal electronic devices. New technologies include:

•  Minicare Acute Care takes blood tests with a simple self-jabbing collector that is read by a handheld device, the results ready in 10 minutes to send to a lab via WiFi connection.

• VISIQ, a mobile ultrasound device that allows safer pregnancies for women in Third World villages. The $10,000 device (which is being made available through world relief organizations) can be easily mastered by village midwives to collect pregnancy data from at-risk moms and transfer it via Internet to area doctors and hospitals.

• Smart Air Purifiers, originally developed for smog-clouded China, that cut down on pollutants in the home including dangerous viruses in the air. You can activate it when you’re away from your home via your phone or tablet with the Philips app to set comfort levels for your return.

• PulseRelief is a strap-on device that helps you “diagnose” your own pain levels and administer electromagnetic pulses to the body at pain areas — say back, neck or thigh — similar to holistic treatments available for decades, but Philips allows you to personalize your treatment. You purchase “doses” online and download them directly to the device.

• BlueControl was developed by Philips to administer LED light to psoriasis vulgaris sufferers. Strap it on to the troubled area; it’s said to reduce symptoms of the disease by 50 percent in clinical trials.

Doctors and tech people were on hand to detail how these devices will become part of everyday healthcare in the near future.

I’ve seen the light

In the world of future lighting, Philips unveiled technologies that will make homes and future cities more efficient and safer. Some of this will come about through Big Data. That’s the focus on analyzing huge data systems — like those of growing cities — to ensure everyone’s on the grid through cloud systems. This will become more and more important as the world’s population pushes to 10 million in the next few decades. Though some of this data collecting sounds a little Orwell-ominous, from what we saw, most of the data will emanate from people’s electronic devices  by their own initiative: self-evaluation apps allowing patients to assist doctors in gathering data and the like. In terms of city lighting, the technology can be used to evaluate, say, where most people congregate during certain times of the day in office buildings (via cell phone data) to reduce heating, lighting and air-conditioning costs.

So far, so good. We saw nifty lighting innovations such as LED-imbedded carpeting that flashes lighted messages and announcements on the shag below you. (This might be useful during emergencies, offering exit directions, etc.)

“Connected lighting” was the buzzword. This involves linked lighting systems that rely on data collected through sensors to personalize settings and efficiency. A test project run in Aruba (population 100,000) reportedly managed to lower energy costs there by 80 percent.

And who will pay for all these radical new lighting setups in the future? Philips is now looking at “light rental” models where cities will simply rent the equipment for a flat fee, and Philips will take care of maintenance while retaining ownership. Eventually, so the pitch goes, such rental schemes will pay for themselves in savings.

On a more basic level, connected lighting will allow you to, say, adjust the level of overhead lighting in your office cubicle. (You like it dim, while Nancy next door likes it super bright.) Using your device and Philips apps, you can adjust a wide variety of settings in the home or office: baby monitors, security devices. It even allows you to adjust the strength of your coffeemaker and its switch-on time using a remote device, without getting out of bed. (Yes, the future is not only bright, it’s somewhat lazy.)

We heard about a Philips Hue app that offers visual cues to alert deaf users to phone messages, calls and warning signals.

Most intriguingly, perhaps, Philips and Accenture have partnered to create a prototype headset that will someday allow sufferers of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) to monitor their biofeedback, control gadgets, and assess their sleep levels — using their own brainwaves.

A visit to the Philips Museum in Eindhoven the previous day enlightened us to the company’s proud history of innovation: over 100,000 patents have emerged from those first initial experiments with light bulb filaments undertaken by Gerard and Anton Philips and their father Frederik back in 1891. As Van Houten said in his speech, Philips LED lights have “catalyzed the shift from lighting products to lighting solutions.” Similarly, health solutions will rely on a growing middle-class emphasis on taking a personal stake in one’s behavior and well-being — something Philips products promise to make easier. 

“Our mission is to improve the lives of three billion people by 2025,” he added, noting that Philips now serves 1.8 billion people per year with its products.

The future is coming. You just have to be bright enough to see it.