Philips and Vodafone step up mobile healthcare efforts
Published: 3 December, 2009
READ MORE: Europe | Vodafone | Philips Electronics | M2M | Medical/Health
All the buzz among operators and device makers is about embedding wireless connectivity in far more products than just phones and netbooks, and healthcare is a key target. Wireless devices to allow remote monitoring of healthcare, for users to manage their own fitness, and to give consumers control of their medical records, are all on the cards, with social objectives from reducing hospital stays, to allowing chronically ill or elderly people to live at home, to cutting wasted healthcare spending, to improving fitness levels and preventative medicine.
Qualcomm's Life Sciences unit has taken a lead, working on monitoring devices and other gadgets that will appear in the market in the short term, and also on more bluesky developments like a Compressed Sensing algorithm, demonstrated recently, for body area networks. This is an application layer technique that reduces the amount of data acquired and sent via a BAN, to shrink power consumption dramatically - Qualcomm says it has applied the technology successfully to blood pressure and heart rate sensors already.
This week, Philips secured a €200m loan from the European Investment Bank to fund R&D across a range of healthcare projects, including image guided intervention and home healthcare. Like Qualcomm, it will work with smaller specialist firms and research institutes around Europe.
Vodafone also has its eyes on this growth market. CEO Vittorio Colao announced a new division this week, dedicated to providing mobile solutions to government agencies and pharmaceutical companies. The cellco will aim for two advantages from this initiative - gaining a strategic early role as a consultant as the market evolves; and gaining actual revenues by running and managing the services over its networks, where machine-to-machine and embedded business models (smart grid and public safety being other hot buttons) will be increasingly significant for generating new revenues.
"The question is not whether governments should use mobile health, it is how they should use it," said Colao, in a keynote speech at Informa's Mobile Healthcare Summit in London. The new unit, which goes live at the beginning of the year, is starting small, employing just 10 people at first, based at Vodafone's corporate center in Newbury, west of London. The team "will focus on healthcare solutions and will work alongside other organizations including pharmaceuticals and government organizations, which can help us to fully understand the needs of healthcare professionals," Colao explained.
"I believe that mobile technology has a significant role to play in the provision of healthcare, primarily in the simplification of workflows, statistical analysis and record keeping and by giving professional healthcare providers the ability to support lifestyle choices for the chronically ill," he added.
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