Category: Health

Healthcare and Assisted Living.

Continua Health Alliance takes the bigamous route – Bluetooth and ZigBee.

After months of debate, the Continua Health Alliance finally announced its choice of wireless technology for low power medical devices.  Bluetooth low energy and ZigBee have been the key antagonists in this process and today Continua decided to make it a threesome and share its bed with both partners.

Both brides proudly announced the forthcoming nuptials, Bluetooth claiming that it had been chosen as the Health Device Standard, and ZigBee pronouncing that it has been selected for the next generation standard.

Whilst most people outside the specification groups will dismiss this as irrelevant, it does have some important implications, as it presents medical device manufacturers with a dilemma – which of these two wireless standards do they choose?  We’re at a point in time where we’re about to witness a new phenomenon of internet connected, consumer medical devices, which will open up the possibility of a new era of personal healthcare.  If manufacturers become confused about which of two incompatible standards to use, they’ll delay their products, with a resulting delay in availability and implementation.  It’s important that doesn’t happen.

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Bluetooth is winning the Medical and Fitness Market

Everyone knows that Bluetooth is in their phone and their headset.  What few realise is how many other products rely on it for their connectivity.  Over the past few years I’ve been working with manufacturers and organisations to integrate wireless into their products, particularly in the area of healthcare and fitness.  Having spoken about the current state of play at a recent conference, it struck me that most of Bluetooth’s success in this area is invisible.  The reality is very different, as the recent statement from the Bluetooth SIG acknowledges – Bluetooth is present in over 20 million health and fitness devices.  Market leaders like Philips, Nonin, Polar, Nintendo and Medtronics have chosen it.  That’s not a arbitrary choice, but one that they’ve made for good technical reasons.  To explain why, I’ve written a report about Bluetooth and the health ecosystem it is enabling.  In it I cover the reasons it has achieved its current success and how it is poised to become the standard for all consumer health and fitness products.  I also cover the changing health demographics to illustrate the reason we need it.  To find out why, download the report – [download id=”2217″ format=”1″ ].

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Twittering about Temazepam – Why social networking can affect your Doctor’s health

The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency recently published a strategy document on how they intend to connect with patients and public bodies.  It’s an eminently sensible thing to do, and when they answered some questions about it they made the equally sensible comment that “these may include using social networking sites, blogs and text messages”.  Rather that concentrating on the good sense of their strategy, that line generated the predictable knee jerk reaction from much of the medical press.  Conservative as ever, they bridled at yet another attempt to let patients and carers take any part in managing their health.  Instead of accepting that there might be something in the announcement, they preferred to puff and pontificate, raking up the standard old muck, such as the claim that 25%of GPs end up treating patients who have bought medicines over the Internet.  You get the impression they’d rather prescribe us a sleeping draught than run the risk that we might spend a waking moment with a web browser.

It’s a shame that this reaction is still so prevalent.  Social networks and the Internet will never be a replacement for medical care, but they have the ability to play a much greater role in how we live and manage disease.  Everyone with an ounce of sense who has looked at the demographics knows that we cannot continue with the current model.  We shouldn’t be pouring scorn on social networking, we should be looking carefully to see how it can help our healthcare experience evolve.

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G24 petition G20 summit for mobile broadband

At last week’s G20 summit, the GSM Association assembled 24 of their operators to provide a petition requesting access to more spectrum.  The reason was to allow them to make mobile broadband a key part of their country’s broadband plans.  Whether or not they get their wish is still to be seen, but it sends a powerful message that they, as well as fixed line operators, can be part of the broadband future.

That’s important for them, as it places them far more firmly on their individual country’s roadmap towards a broadband future.  In turn, that’s important to handset developers, who will see it as justification to include broadband related technologies and features.  And it’s important to manufacturers of connected consumer devices that will extend the broadband reach beyond the handset.  It gives further emphasis to Bluetooth’s claim to be the mainstream low power technology for low power healthcare devices.  The reason is simple – an expansion of handsets supporting mobile broadband will mean a bigger critical mass of Bluetooth gateways.  That’s a reality the Continua Health Alliance and health device designers needs to factor into their plans.

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Could Assisted Living provide Life after Financial Services?

At some point in the future, we’re going to come out of recession.  What’s almost certain is that the economic landscape will have changed.  One of the changes is likely to be a major reduction in the size and strength of the financial services sector.  There’s a strong possibility that it will not be the economic powerhouse that it has been over the previous decade.  Which raises the question of what will take its place?

 

One of the candidates being talked about is healthcare.  We are entering recession with a population that is ageing.  Politicians are talking about the need to reform healthcare systems to cope with this demographic change, as well as with the rising levels of long term, chronic conditions within the population at large.  In most of the Western world healthcare currently accounts for around 10% of GDP, rising to almost 20% in the US.  It could be that heaIthcare will become the focus for the next major service development.

 

Over the next few weeks in the UK, conferences are taking place that look at the structure and needs of Assisted Living, as well as the funding that is available.  These include a themed networking event at de Montfort University (which is free to attend) and an in-depth, two day conference run by the IET in London.   In the same fortnight, at least three other smaller scale conferences are running at other venues in the UK.  The interest level is definitely rising.

 

Healthcare needs to change and evolve.  If innovators rise to the challenge we may see Assisted Living and eHealth move from their current position of “poor cousins” to become as mainstream and as important to our economies as other services have been in the past.  I’ll be speaking and posting reports from these conferences to indicate the temperature.  I hope to meet some of you there.

The Doctor in your Pocket

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, meeting place of all that is new and shiny in the mobile business, gave unexpected attention to the subject of mobile healthcare.   As well as announcements by the GSMA Development Fund and UN Foundation on the progress that is happening in the developing world, the GSM Association also hosted a panel session on mHealth, which I was fortunate enough to moderate.

Alongside me were David Neale of  Telus and  Brian O’Connor of the European Connected Health Campus. Both are pioneers in mobile health and excellent advocates for the subject.  The biggest question we all had, which we posed to the networks and service providers is “why aren’t you doing it?”  The examples shown by the GSMA’s “Doctor in your Pocket” report show that mobile phones can play a persuasive part in healthcare.  Yet network operators in the West constantly reject health applications in favour of content.  It doesn’t need to be like that.

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