CES® 2019 is just about upon us and our planning for the event is complete!
Well, mostly anyway.
You know that old saying, “planning the trip is half the fun”? With CES, planning the trip is half the stress.
With so much to see and do at CES, with the 2019 version looking even bigger than ever before, deciding what to do with the limited time there is very stressful.
The other half of the stress will, of course, come next week, when we try to get it all done. With nearly 200,000 other people at CES trying to see it all themselves, just moving can be a challenge at times.
CES Challenge by the Numbers
The challenge of planning for coverage of CES and then carrying out that plan is the sheer scale of the event. Numbers alone don’t tell the story, but these will give you some idea.
There are over 2.75 million square feel of exhibits — that’s 57 football fields — spread over multiple locations in Las Vegas. That’s a lot of walking, shuttles, rideshares, and rides on the monorail. Mostly walking.
In addition to the formal exhibit space, there are conference spaces, auditoriums for keynote speeches, meeting spaces, and MUCH more throughout CES.
At last count, there are 4,545 total exhibitors. More on these below.
407 conference sessions are on the schedule, with multiple sessions going on at most times. That means we couldn’t cover them all if we wanted. Most of them will have long lines and will fill to capacity, with many would-be attendees unable to get inside the meeting room to listen.
Yes, just thinking about all this gives me a headache!
In addition to those numbers, we have already received hundreds of emails from exhibitors seeking to set up interviews, demonstrations, and booth visits so we get their story and share it with you.
Still, we have looked forward to it each year. There must be something great there to overcome the headaches, crowds, sore feet, and more — right?? Not to mention going back to the room at the end of the day and writing up an article to provide you the latest info.
It’s worth it to us to stay on top of the innovations coming for family caregivers and seniors — and to bring them to you.
Thinking Behind our CES 2019 Plan
After pouring through the schedule and exhibitor list, we have put together our tentative schedule for CES 2019. We call it tentative because something always happens to change plans once we get into it and it always seems we encounter companies and people we decide must be fit into the schedule.
We decided to prioritize exhibits over conference sessions, press events, and even one-on-one meetings this year. All those things are beneficial, but the heart and soul of CES is on the exhibit floor and we have not yet been able to take the time we wanted with the vast array of exhibits.
Our objective is to visit each booth, as we never know what we will find, but have marked some key exhibitors, those with tech we think will be of greatest interest and benefit to family caregivers.
The biggest change from our schedule in prior years is a reduction in the number of conference sessions we are targeting. I say “targeting” because we realize we are unlikely to get into all we would like to see due to space limitations.
In past years we have found the least value in conference sessions that have so many speakers that none get to cover a topic in enough depth to give us much more than soundbites. Once each speakers gets an introduction, there really is not much time left for the moderator’s questions, much less interaction with the audience.
For example, one of our favorite conference tracks in the past has been the Digital Health Summit. This year, however, their schedule includes an 80-minute session with 9 speakers, a 90-minute session with 10 speakers, and a 115-minute session with 15 speakers. Those sessions should be good for some tweets, but we don’t expect the speakers to have time to provide the kind of meaty content we want to give you.
Conference Schedule Highlights
After reading and rereading the conference schedule over the last several weeks, we are particularly targeting these sessions for coverage.
- Independent Living: Serving Consumers at Home — This session, part of Connections Summit, has a title that explains why it is important to us. Yes, this is another with a full panel of speakers in a short time, but we still expect to get some great insights and maybe catch a couple of the speakers for a few minutes afterward.
- Creating Tomorrow’s Robotic Caregivers — Both this session and the conference track of which it is part, Service Robotics Arrive in Daily Life, have titles that make clear why they are of great interest to us. We are really looking forward to learning more about the support family caregivers can hope to get from robotic caregivers.
- Three sessions in what looks to be a great conference track, Disruptive Innovations in Health Care, which is being presented by the Consumer Technology Association and American Heart Association.
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- What’s Hot in Health at CES 2019
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- Digital Therapeutics: Empowering People and Revolutionizing Treatment
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- Telehealth and the Uberization of Health Care
- Consumer Data: Rewriting the Rules of Engagement for Health — This session, from the Digital Health Summit, will delve into what the health care industry can learn from more consumer-oriented businesses when it comes to being health care providers.
These are not the only conference sessions that interest us, nor do we think we will get into all of them. We will let you know what we learn from those we are able to attend.
Watch for Our CES 2019 Updates
We will be updating you on CES 2019 from the beginning of Media Days through the week and beyond.
We will be posting on Facebook, Twitter, and here at Senior Care Corner to keep you up on the latest.
In the meantime, please let us know if there are specific topics you would like us to investigate and report the results most closely.