11/24/2009
RCR Wireless
As the West Wireless Health Institute prepares to open for business next month in San Diego, Qualcomm Inc.’s initiatives to develop a mobile healthcare ecosystem are becoming more tangible, starting with a physical building where scientists, doctors and engineers can work to prove the clinical benefits of using wireless connectivity to improve healthcare.
The institute, formed by Qualcomm in collaboration with the Scripps Translational Science Institute and philanthropers Barry and Mary West, is a medical research organization that focuses on driving wireless into healthcare. To date, $45 million has been publicly committed to the institute, but the actual number is much higher, said Don Jones, who is leading Qualcomm’s efforts in the space as VP of Health & Life Sciences at the company. The institute just hired Mehran Mehregany as executive VP of engineering and chief of engineering research. Mehregany is a leader in MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) research; the institute is in the process of hiring 200 post-doctoral researchers to study using sensor technologies in healthcare.
Thus, Qualcomm is seeing progress on an initiative started seven years ago and highlighted during April’s CTIA Wireless 2009 show in Las Vegas. “We’re taking a very long-term approach” to integrating wireless into the healthcare industry. “They have to see the value in that connectivity, which we think is collapsing space and time,” Jones said.
Big-picture organizations
As such, Qualcomm has a vested role in building the ecosystem. Beyond the WWHI, the company is working with four large organizations to develop the mobile healthcare ecosystem.
• It is part of the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance, a trade group of academics and senior executives in wireless and healthcare committed to wireless healthcare business opportunities. About 750 people attended the trade group’s last event.
• It is part of a standards group called Continua Health Alliance, a 200-company member nonprofit that certifies consumer-facing products for interoperability. Basically, this stamp of approval assures a customer that his blood oxygen monitor talks to his mobile phone and the Google Health information.
• It is a strategic adviser to the mHealth Alliance, a global organization founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation committed to maximizing mobile health globally.
• And it is working with CTIA to help grow the interest of wireless companies in the mobile healthcare space.
“We’re at the very early stages of two large elephants trying to get together,” Jones commented. The wireless business is a $1 trillion dollar industry and the healthcare industry is a $4.5 trillion industry. Further, $2.5 trillion of that spend takes place in the United States, and 90% of that $4.5 trillion spend takes place in North America, Europe and Japan.
Going forward, Jones sees a huge opportunity in bringing mobile healthcare to less-developed countries like China and India. One simple application already commercial uses a scratch card on a box that has a code users can text message to a number to find out if the pharmaceutical drugs they are buying are real or counterfeit. About 25% of the pharmaceutical drugs sold in India are fake, causing a lot of trouble for the suppliers as well as the government, Jones noted. This simple solution is an easy-to-understand application that assures patients they are taking legitimate drugs.
Technology focuses
Qualcomm is presently concentrating on ultra-low power radios for smart band-aids and digital signal processors that work to eliminate noises produced by movement so the smart band-aids can properly transmit information from the wearer back to the monitoring organization. Smart band-aids, like one offered by Corventis, can monitor a number of conditions. Today, they are used to monitor heart arrhythmias and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. COPD takes the single largest share of healthcare dollars today, Jones said. Monitoring the fluid in the lungs with a smart band-aid can help doctors know when patients need drugs to reduce the fluid in the body, before the condition becomes so severe that the patient has to be hospitalized.
