Co-Building the Future of Home Healthcare with underrepresented patients: An Entrepreneur’s Journey Through AI, Data Quality, and the Courage to Fail

Speaker: Eric Harris, Founder, Canary MedTech

DESCRIPTION:
Join Eric Harris, Founder & CEO of Canary MedTech, for a candid conversation about what it really takes to build a next-generation remote patient monitoring suite for populations who have historically been left out of the data. With experience spanning NASA, the U.S. Army, Microsoft, and multiple startups, Eric brings a grounded view of how innovation actually happens, messy, imperfect, and full of lessons that can only be learned in the field.

In this session, Eric will explore:

AI in the Real World, Not the Pitch Deck Version

Beyond the hype, AI is being used today for customer feedback analysis, product development acceleration, and “vibe-coding” during user research. But real users often prompt incorrectly, misunderstand outputs, or assume the model “knows” more than it does. Eric shares the failures, the hallucinations, and the uncomfortable truth: AI without domain context is not just unhelpful, it can be harmful.

This is a look at what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Building What Users Actually Need

From Jose (12-year Marine veteran) to Chris (a 30-year paraplegic) to Eric’s own brother, mobility-impaired users consistently reveal a different physiological reality than the national datasets most AI tools are trained on. Their stories show why user-driven design is not optional, and how easily we get it wrong when we build based on assumptions instead of lived experience.

The Data Baseline Crisis

For wheelchair users and mobility-impaired adults, heart rate, blood pressure, glucose, and weight-distribution baselines look nothing like “standard averages.”

Yet the industry still treats them as outliers.

Eric explains why this is not just a market opportunity but a moral and scientific imperative—and why relying on incomplete datasets (or generic AI outputs) will only widen existing healthcare disparities.

A Path Toward Better Systems

Eric will share how Canary MedTech is working to build devices, protocols, and datasets that reflect real people, not statistical abstractions.

This session is for: Entrepreneurs, researchers, engineers, and clinicians working on home-based care technologies, AI/ML in healthcare, remote patient monitoring, and inclusive medical device design, especially those who believe we must move faster to build systems that truly reflect the populations they serve.