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

“My view is now that Continua has certified Zigbee as the phase 2 certification instrumentality, basically all of the devices that vendors customarily make for home use will go Zigbee,” Miller said. “The certifications which should happen in the next six months will effecgtively reflect a lot of vendors running to that side of the boat.”

Continua’s certification guidelines began with Version One, which looked at three key components, said Charles Parker, Continua executive director.

“There are the devices that are worn,” Parker said. “They are typically very lightweight devices in the sense that they don’t have a lot of intelligence, we don’t want them to have a lot of intelligence because they need to be as small as possible to be unobtrusive. Then there are hub devices or managers that collect that information from several different devices in the home. It could be a fixed device such as a PC or a custom-built box or a smart phone with application built into it. The third component is what we call the XHR sender - -XHR standing for personal health record or electronic health record – whatever record you want to send, the sender sends out a fully formed and compliant document to interface with the applications that are out there. So electronic health records in a physician’s office or potentially in home health agencies could communicate.”

Version Two of the Continua guidelines also institutes the wide area network, which includes the communications strategy, Parker said, with defined security and network protocols. “That is underway right now, it was just ratified and certified,” he said. “We are going to be using Web services and HL7, Version 2.6 [Health Level 7, a global framework for interchange of electronic health information] in the communication model.”

To date, there are only two devices publicly announced as certified by Continua, both of which are pulse oxymeters, Parker said, but there are many more in the pipeline.

What all this standards work means for telecom service providers is that they will be able to, if they choose, develop services around remote monitoring, either as part of a broadband offering or a value-added service, and work to a defined standard embraced by the technology community. For patients, this wearable monitoring approach offers a better level of care.

Next: Where does telecom fit in the remote monitoring value chain?