Telemedicine Trends, Part 2: Wearable radio devices to transform home health monitoring

(Read part one of this series here.)

Telemedicine is hardly a new discipline – for more than a decade, hospitals and doctors have been keeping tabs on patients in their homes using devices from companies such as Philips and CardioCom, connected to POTS lines via dialup modems or, more recently, broadband connections, to do daily checkups on chronically ill patients.

With the advent of new radio devices that are small enough to be worn by patients and capable of providing real-time diagnostic information, a new category of telemedicine is emerging. Doctors and hospitals will be able to have a constant stream of diagnostic information about patients with heart problems, diabetes, blood disorders and much more. The health care and technology industries are gearing up to see this technology widely deployed, even as business models for how it all happens are still developing.

“Powered by advanced signal processing, we now have sophisticated chip radios where you can literally put an entire RF on a chip along with processing and other assets,” said Robert Miller, executive director of technology research at AT&T Labs. “Radio has grown up and is ready to be used as part of the network, not just bolted onto it.”

By using small “medical jewelry,” as Miller calls it, home monitoring services can be much less obtrusive and can gather a stream of information that doctors can use more proactively than the once-a-day downloads more commonly used today.

“To be fair, up to now, telemedicine has been a niche application space,” said AT&T’s Miller. “There have been things available. Clearly you can buy devices you can use at home to measure your blood pressure or your blood sugar.  Many of these either require you write down the measurements and take them to your doctor, or you feed the collected data to the doctor or database over such advanced technology as tip-ring modems. It’s pretty clear that if you made available medical measurements that were vital sign related in such a way as to be sort of real time – you could have a lot of benefits.”

The availability of wireless monitoring devices is happening at the same time that the healthcare industry is being deluged by the demands of chronic disease, said Harry Wang, director of health and mobile products at Parks Associates in a July Webcast.

“There is an intersection here of life science and technology,” Wang said. While wireless technologies are proliferating – there are 3.5 billion wireless subscribers worldwide and nearly 2 billion mobile applications downloaded over the last 12 months – there are also a growing number of chronic illnesses including 24 million diabetics and almost 55 million pre-diabetics in the U.S. alone and more than 90 million U.S. residents with one or more chronic conditions.

“One advantage is that you develop a baseline of measurements that you don’t have to consciously or with difficulty upload, because you could do it automatically over wireless in your home,” Miller said. “Moreover, that baseline is free of the white coat syndrome. A lot of people measure differently in the doctor’s office than they do when relaxed and at home.” 

The real-time data aids doctors’ decision making so symptoms aren’t missed, Wang said, while the continuous nature of the wireless information provides trends, not data points to better monitor chronic conditions.

This summer, an industry coalition called the Continua Healthcare Alliance advanced the cause further by announcing the latest version of its guidelines for remote monitoring, which builds on standards from the IEEE, Health Level 7 and the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and chose the ZigBee wireless standard as its low-power LAN. Continue combines health-care organizations with technology companies.

“ZigBee is a WiFi-like radio solution that is kind of the counterpoint of WiFi, specifically designed for sensor and control apps, meaning applications that don’t require such high bandwidth, but have to work for a long time on a little bitty battery and cost not much and in some cases occupy almost no space,” Miller said. “Zigbee was specifically designed to do that.”

ZigBee-compatible devices are already being used in other types of sensors, such as for home security, but with the adoption of Zigbee Health Care by Continua, the market is likely to see a flood of new health-care monitoring devices, Miller said.