December 17th, 2011 by Felasfa Wodajo, M.D. in News
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One of the major announcements at last week’s mHealth Summit was made by Qualcomm who introduced a new platform for wirelessly connecting medical devices. The 2net platform abstracts away the details of connecting a sensor to a cloud-based server.
Right now, if a company develops a great lightweight sensor to measure, say, walking speed, it will also have to engineer a way for that information to be transferred wirelessly, sometimes across a couple of stops, to its eventual destination somewhere on a server. Although these same challenges repeat for every device, each company has to “reinvent the wheel”.
Additionally, once it arrives at the company’s servers that rich collection of data would still be isolated – in a “data silo”. If another company comes along with a terrific heart rate sensor and suggests, “why don’t we combine the two data streams and make a useful new app”, not only would they have to recreate the entire chain of communication for themselves, the two companies would have to agree to methods for their two servers to talk and share information.
2Net makes almost all of the above problems Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
November 17th, 2011 by Felasfa Wodajo, M.D. in Expert Interviews
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Dr. Eric Topol
It is hard to easily comprehend the depth and breadth of Dr. Topol’s career. He has been a major figure in cardiology, genomics and wireless health while also assuming leadership positions in landmark institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic and the Scripps Institute in La Jolla.
As chairman of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, he led the program to become number one for heart care. He was lead investigator on numerous national & worldwide cardiovascular clinical trials and started a medical school at the Clinic. He was also among the first physicians nationwide to call attention to the potential cardiac dangers of Vioxx. His very public criticism of Merck and the FDA brought to light the intimate but not always visible connections between the pharmaceutical industry and academic medicine.
Later he moved to San Diego, where he currently serves as director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, Chief Academic Officer for Scripps Health and Professor of Translational Genomics. He has been a leading proponent of wireless medicine for more than a decade. He co-founded the West Wireless Health Institute with Gary and Mary West who contributed the initial $45m gift to start the Institute and have since committed an additional $100m to found a not-for-profit venture fund for wireless health companies. He currently serves as Vice Chairman of the Institute which is dedicated to “innovating, validating, and advocating for the use of technologies including wireless medical devices to transform medicine.” Be sure to check out our recent interview of WWHI chief executive Don Casey.
Dr. Topol is delivering the opening keynote for the mHealth Summit on December 5. His new book “The Creative Destruction of Medicine” is also making its debut at the Summit as an e-book, available to meeting attendees. Read below to hear his thoughts on the mHealth Summit and wireless platforms’ potential to improve health & transform the practice of medicine.
Why are you participating in the mHealth Summit? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
January 15th, 2011 by Iltifat Husain, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion
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The potential of mobile phones to improve health is most acutely visible in developing countries. iMedicalApps covered the recent mHealth Summit, where there were many inspiring demonstrations of how voice and simple text messages can have a profound effect on the health of those countries’ citizens. Jhpiego has successfully worked on these problems for three decades and was recently awarded a $100m grant. James Bon Tempo has extensive experience in this field and we are thrilled that he is sharing his insights with the readers of iMedicalApps.
This is a guest post from James BonTempo.
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Mobile Health In Developing Countries
I am a user and an implementer of technology, not an inventor or developer, so my constraints, challenges and requirements are different than those of many attendees of the recent mHealth Summit. And for others like me who work in international aid and development, mobile technology is simply a tool, and one of many in a large toolbox that includes various best practices and proven approaches. At Jhpiego (an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University), we have piloted a number of different mobile interventions — from simple SMS to Java & smartphone-based applications — but the challenge for us is to identify the most appropriate technologies, the tools that will help us to strengthen health systems in limited resource settings most effectively and most efficiently. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
