Wearables and other connected devices have been available to help treat chronic conditions like asthma and heart disease for a while now. But thus far, the nation’s 30 million diabetics largely have been ignored. They haven’t seen much to help them to improve their health or reduce the daily grind of finger pricks and needle pokes.

The $2.5 billion connected-care industry may be off to a late start in diabetes, but it’s making up for lost time. A new breed of connected glucometers, insulin pumps and smartphone apps is hitting the market that promise to make it easier for diabetics to manage the slow-progressing disease and keep them motivated with feedback and support. Startups and multinationals alike plan to showcase the technology this week in Las Vegas at the industry’s flagship health-tech show, produced by the Health Information and Management Systems Society, or HIMSS, industry group.

And in as little as two years, the industry plans to take charge of the entire uncomfortable, time-consuming routine of checking and regulating blood-sugar levels with something called an artificial pancreas. Such systems mimic the functions of a healthy pancreas by blending continuous glucose monitoring, remote-controlled insulin pumps and artificial intelligence to maintain healthy blood-sugar levels automatically.

Read my entire column in the Tech section of USA TODAY.

I’ve exceeded the step goal that my smartwatch set for me all but four days this month. So that’s good, right?

I suppose so. Except that my average daily step count fell more than 15 percent this month from November, when I missed the daily goal only once. So that means this month’s activity level is bad?

Maybe. I don’t know. Honestly, after 24 months and more than 6 million steps recorded by about a dozen different trackers and smartwatches, the only thing I’m sure of is this: I am now two years older than when I started.

If you’re the proud owner of one of the 80 million wearables shipped this year, then you’re no stranger to this sort of head-scratching.  Really, unless you’re a fitness fanatic, the stream of step counts and goal-beating atta-boy’s from these devices don’t seem much more pertinent to your overall health and wellbeing than fantasy football alerts.

Mercifully, 2016 will bring a new generation of wearables and apps worthy of the “smart” tag. Rather than simply spewing tallies culled from built-in sensors, they hope to hold your interest and avoid the sock drawer by delivering relevant insight and timely wellness advice. The first wave of this new breed will begin rolling out next week at CES in Las Vegas, where I’ll be moderating a panel for the industry on user interfaces for next-generation wearables.

Read on to see what you have to look forward to. Find my entire USA TODAY column HERE.

Is it time to put a new PC on your holiday list? As publications swell with holiday deals, it’s a question many of you should consider. By Intel’s estimates, there are 117 million four- and five-year-old PCs across the country – and a half-billion worldwide – still in use.

Honestly, if you’re one of the millions out there wondering whether to trade up from your aging, pokey laptop, technology analysts like myself aren’t the best people to ask for advice. We’re usually outfitted with the latest gear. Which means we’ve got an intimate appreciation of the state of the art. But we don’t have a good feel for the leap you’d be taking to a new Windows 10 2-in-1 built around Intel’s sixth-generation Core microprocessor, code-named Skylake.

To bridge the experience gap, I decided to walk a mile in your shoes. So before I tested the Spectre x2, a new Skylake-based 2-in-1 from HP, I dusted off my circa-2011 laptop and made it mine for a few days.

Find out what I found out. Read my entire USA TODAY Tech column HERE.

Raise your hand if you don’t give two shoes about how many steps you took today.

That’s what I thought.

You are the smartwatch silent majority. You kept your mouths – and your wallets – on lockdown during wave after wave of wrist-worn wearables catered to minutiae-minded fitness freaks. You nodded knowingly as others’ Fitbit’s, worn with such conviction after New Year’s, ended up stashed with dusty Shake Weights and Abdominizers by spring break.

Well guess what? Your patience is being rewarded. Because as Black Friday approaches, manufacturers are now pointing their wearables squarely at you.

Read my entire USA TODAY Tech column HERE.

When it comes to healthcare tech, are you East Coast or West Coast? Here’s a quick test to help you find out.

OK, so you’ve just invented a new wearable that could revolutionize care for diabetics. The device measures glucose levels through the skin, so patients will never have to draw blood again. Your device sends continuous readings to patients’ smartphones, which will give them much finer control over their blood sugar levels.

You’ve clearly got a winner on your hands. Now what?

Are you feeling a rush of urgency to get your brainchild to market? Do you want to damn the torpedoes, and go full speed ahead? If so, then your health-tech geography is decidedly West Coast. If, on the other hand, you’re starting to think about how to securely feed the information into patients’ health records, scheduling clinical trials, and booking meetings at the Food and Drug Administration, then you’re an East Coast health techie.

Of course, the philosophical differences are borne more out of professional background than location. You can find plenty of both mentalities on each side of the Mississippi. That said, innovators grounded in healthcare, who better understand how doctors, nurses and other caregivers work, are more commonly associated with the East Coast. They better understand the arduous process of testing a new app or smartphone device and taking it through the regulatory process.

And tech-first companies, which typically bloom in West-Coast locales like Silicon Valley, Seattle and San Diego, tend to be driven more by, well, technology.

“The healthcare industry needs to drive better health, better cost and better population management,” said Dr. Michael Weiner, IBM’s Chief Medical Information Officer. “And the tech side brings the technology that makes it all possible. It’s a match made in heaven.”

It can be. To be sure, the companies that effectively mesh the two mentalities have a far better chance for success. Many point to Silicon Valley startups 23andme, which has a mail-in DNA-testing service, and Theranos, which offers a quick, low-cost blood-testing alternative, as examples of what can happen when one orientation overpowers the other. Indeed, both companies have suffered well-publicized setbacks dealt by the FDA.

Find out how successful companies are blending East and West in my USA TODAY column HERE.

Forward-thinking Chinese appliance vendors like Haier are getting aggressive about turning the Connected Home vision into a reality. They are integrating connectivity across their product lines, from wine coolers to water heaters. Because of lengthy replacement cycles for home appliances, Haier understands that an appliances it sells today will have to connect with a broad range of other smart devices ten years from now. To help ensure that happens, Haier is future-proofing its broad line of appliances by integrating intelligent, platform-agnostic connectivity components from Qualcomm.

Read more about Haier is trying to make the Connected Home dream a reality in my USA TODAY column HERE.

And find out how Haier is future-proofing its smart appliances in my blog post HERE.

If you were frustrated by early versions of personal digital assistance apps like Siri or Google Now, it might be time to try again. A new wave of the technology is beginning to roll out with a lot more knowledge and horsepower behind it to help our laptops, tablets and smartphones fit naturally into the way we work and play.

With the rollout of Windows 10 to millions of PCs now underway, Microsoft’s Cortana is the most visible effort of this new wave of personal assistance technology. But there are others, of course. Notably: Apple’s Siri, Google Now for Android, Amazon’s unique living-room product called Echo, and dozens of apps that leverage IBM’s Watson suite of cognitive tools. The apps all promise great advances in the search function, one of the most ubiquitous activities in our connected lives. Even more exciting, though, is the potential they have to transcend beyond looking up things we ask to begin anticipating our needs and, over time, even acting on our behalf.

To find out more about how they work and what they can do for you, read my USA TODAY column HERE.

The market for connected-home devices has been growing rapidly. But thus far, it’s been DIY’ers who have been driving demand. If the market is going to surpass the billion-unit-a-year mark as forecasted, the done-for-you types will have to join in. Sears thinks it’s figured out how to do just that.

Read my entire column at USA TODAY HERE.

MINI today unveiled a new heads-up display concept that’s embedded not in a windshield but in a pair of augmented reality glasses at the Auto Shanghai show. I got to try it out on Friday.

The verdict: it’s pretty cool.

The glasses have a few advantages over heads-up displays integrated into the windshield. For one, the speed limit, gas gauge, upcoming street names and other contextually relevant information comes with you if you happen to glance away. (Just be careful, OK?)

There’s also an opportunity to tailor the information on the heads-up display for where you’re looking. MINI showed off one example: a safety feature it calls X-Ray view. The demonstration vehicle has a pair of side cameras – one on each side – that it employs for detecting hazards. In the demo, the glasses lit up because a child’s ball was rolling toward the passenger side of the car. And when I looked over, I actually saw “through” the vehicle to see the ball by the front tire.

The glasses, by the way, are built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 processor. They make use of the chipmaker’s Vuforia augmented-reality platform to determine where you’re looking – and when to empower you with X-Ray vision.

The glasses are compatible with several MINI models already on the road, and could be made to work with other automakers’ cars as well. MINI doesn’t yet have a timetable for turning the glasses into a real product.

Here’s another advantage of the heads-up display glasses over windshield units: the heads-up display sits behind the glasses. On a bright sunny day, that means you don’t have to lift your polarized sunglasses just to see what’s on the display. As someone who’s in danger of developing repetitive stress syndrome from constantly lifting and lowering my sunglasses while driving, that may be the biggest advantage of all.

Windows RT was doomed from the start, with Microsoft offering only the Modern UI with few apps and shockingly little support for apps on the desktop, which had all the apps PC users ever needed. And now it’s over.

At least it sure seems that way. With the first two generations of its own-brand PC line, Microsoft offered the RT-based Surface models, which offered lots of battery life at the expense of support for the apps you cared about, and the Surface Pro, which had the apps but couldn’t keep pace on power.

With the third version, the Surface Pro has made great strides in performance, usability and battery life. And the Surface is now built around Intel’s low-power Atom lineup – which means it’s got great battery life and supports all the apps you know and love (and hate) on Windows.

The death knell for Windows RT? I’d say so. Read more HERE.

We learned a lot more about Samsung’s mobile technology outlook from the company’s annual reveal than how thin, light and powerful the new Galaxy S6 will be. You can read it all in my USA TODAY column.

On the eve of the biggest mobile industry event of the year, one of the more high-profile technologies for dealing with the growing cellular capacity crunch is leaving the lab and making its way out into the real world. The technology, called Unlicensed LTE, or LTE-U, puts the latest 4G cellular technology onto Wi-Fi bands.

Because LTE-U touches both Wi-Fi and cellular networks, influential trade groups from both sides want a say in how the standard develops. They’ll resolve their issues, I’m sure. They’ll have to, because the cellular capacity shortfall is getting worse.

In the meantime, I’ve seen LTE-U in action in a highly dense environment, where the technology should shine. And it does.

Read my entire USA TODAY column HERE.

“If you don’t want it now, you’ll want it in six to nine months. It’s proliferating fast,” Feibus said, adding that Qualcomm has been aggressie in pushing 4K into lower-cost devices.

Read the entire PC World story on Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon processors, which bring 4K video and fast LTE to mainstream smartphones, HERE.