Matthew Webster: Digital Life What happened in Vegas

Every year, in January, there is a huge event in Las Vegas called CES – the Consumer Electronics Show.

It is one of the largest tech-based trade shows aimed at you and me and it’s a place for all manufacturers to display their latest products, prototypes and dreams. Exhibitors include tiny companies and colossi such as Samsung and Microsoft.

Its scale is astonishing: over 3,200 exhibitors spread across 50 acres of Las Vegas conference centres. The stuff displayed includes thousands of next-generation TVs, laptops, smart home gadgets and more.

I have no desire to visit such a mammoth event (or to visit Las Vegas for any reason), but there is extensive

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CES is important, as far as any such event can be, not just because of the individual products that appear, but because of the industry trends that it reveals. That’s not to say that the products are dull – far from it.

But many will never make it into serious production. Manufacturers often use events like this to gauge what the public think of their ideas, in the hope that if they see real people laughing at a prototype, they can save a fortune by cancelling it.

However, in the world of actually available products, and leaving aside the obligatory droning-on about sustainability that infests every presentation, the two main growth trends seem to be in health-related gadgets and simpler TVs.

There is a real explosion in the creation of home health-monitoring products. One company even announced plans to use artificial intelligence to measure your blood pressure, heart rate and other things, just by looking at your picture – diagnosis by selfie.

If it works, this is an extraordinary development, and offers the fascinating prospect of being able to check the blood pressure of politicians on TV as they get crosser and crosser.

I welcome this general trend. Given the pressure on the NHS, the more reliable information about our health we can generate ourselves, the better.

Another welcome development is that the newest televisions are being made with fewer bells and whistles. I’m delighted to hear it. So-called smart TVs can be hard to fathom and frustrating to use, and the software inside them can go out of date just months after you’ve bought one.

If iPlayer or something similar doesn’t respond quickly when you press the button on your remote, it may well be because the TV software is outdated and not as smart as it used to be.

The solution is un-smart televisions and smart add-on boxes (often less than £30) through which you access internetbased services. They work well, and buying an improved smart box in a year or two won’t break the bank, unlike buying a new TV.

But what of the dreamers? There were more than 1,000 start-ups enthusiastically peddling their wares at this year’s CES. Some may be brilliant, while some are just barmy, like the £3,000 self-driving baby buggy.

I doubt that any sane parent would entrust their child to such a thing –but they’ve thought of that. It moves under its own steam only if there is no child in it. So to make it shift, the child has to walk. Brilliant. Your child will, in effect, be taking the buggy for a walk. Then there is an electric car that changes colour, a fridge that glows at night (why?) and a box that hangs inside your lavatory bowl and analyses your urine, sending the results to your mobile phone.

I get enough waste products on my mobile phone as it is, thank you. I don’t need more.