Wireless Medical Blog
The Continua Health Alliance – where next?
By Vaishali Kamat - Last updated: Thursday, May 6, 2010Progress in telehealth and telemedicine has been limited by the lack of coordination and standardisation between device manufacturers. To address this, in 2006 the Continua Health Alliance was formed with the aim of promoting an ecosystem of interoperable health devices. The Continua Health Alliance is a not for profit alliance of medical device manufacturers, technology providers, and health service providers. Promoter members include Intel, Qualcomm, Roche, and Medtronic. The Alliance now has over 200 member organisations and has made tangible progress towards its goal.
Rather than develop new standards, the Alliance has taken the pragmatic approach of setting guidelines that mandate the use of existing standards in combination to achieve end-to-end interoperability. For example, the Version 1 guidelines mandate the use of the Bluetooth Health Device Profile as the wireless transport and IEEE11073 as the data layer. This approach ensures that devices from different manufacturers can be used by the same application. In 2009 the first six devices passed successfully through Continua’s certification program.
Cambridge Consultants has been leading the way in enabling its customers to achieve Continua certification. Our Vena protocol stack implements the full Version 1 guidelines, and was first to achieve Bluetooth HDP certification. Since then it has been deployed by a number of our customers including A&D Medical, who were first to achieve Continua certification for both their weight scale and blood pressure meter products.
So where next for the Alliance?
The Continua Health Alliance now has a number of certified devices already in the market, and more products are on their way. A major next step will be to demonstrate system roll out and deployment in the hands of the consumer. For this to happen, the Alliance is concentrating on two major steps:
The first step involves existing telehealth services transitioning to the Continua standards. There are significant incentives for telehealth providers to adopt the guidelines, as providers will then be able to purchase devices from multiple manufacturers, supporting a single interface which will reduce overall system cost and complexity.
The second step is to stimulate adoption of the standards in the mobile phone sector. With its selection of Bluetooth, Continua paved the way for a wide range of health and fitness services to be offered via mobile devices, and in 2010 we should see the first handsets that will enable developers to launch new health services.
Beyond the immediate product launches, the Continua Health Alliance is also generating extensions to its guidelines to address high volume consumer products. These extensions exploit the introduction of Bluetooth Low Energy, and ZigBee to address in-home networks for independent living.
Challenges and pitfalls - Confusing the consumer
In its quest for interoperability Continua offered the hope that any product with a Continua Certified logo would be able to communicate with any other Continua Certified product. It is becoming increasingly clear that this wont be the case. Even with the version one guidelines not all devices support both wired and wireless connection, so you would at least need to look for the Bluetooth and USB logos as well. Then the list of device types began to grow so a device certified today could not support all future device types. With the introduction of an increasing number of technologies (e.g ZigBee) this picture is getting more confusing.
The vision of one logo guaranteeing interoperable health and medical devices is no longer a reality. What the continua logo will now offer is a set of tools that enable the development of health services.
So what would my prescription be?
The Alliance will not introduce a new transport unless its members identify a new use case that cannot be met by an existing transport. This is not enough to limit the confusing growth of wireless technologies that Continua could end up supporting (NFC WiFi?). The Directors need to provide some steering and act to ensure that they meet their goals of simple interoperability.
The Alliance has done a good job of overcoming the hurdle of interoperability. They are working with the FDA to clarify any regulatory concerns, so the only major hurdle that stands in the way is revenue. The biggest challenge for companies entering this market is working out how they will get paid. Is this an area where Continua can help?
