When phones swallow dedicated devices
 Jitterbug’s acquisition of mobile personal emergency response system (M-PERS) start-up MobiWatch this week was demonstrative of a business model and device strategy that doesn’t seem to work in today’s wireless health market. MobiWatch’s planned offering, MobiFob, was a key-chain with a button that connected via Bluetooth to the user’s cell phone. When the MobiFob’s button was pressed the user’s phone would dial MobiWatch’s service line, which could then send an ambulance, police or alert the user’s care giver. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Jitterbug has announced plans to integrate the service side of MobiWatch’s offering while dropping the MobiFob. Jitterbug stated that “the MobiWatch offering will be further developed by Jitterbug before coming to market” in 2010 as an integrated service that resides on the Jitterbug’s phones. We assume that MobiWatch’s agreement with Sprint Nextel is of little use to Jitterbug, while MobiWatch’s agreement with Cambridge-based emergency response service provider, ProEMS Solutions, was a key part of the deal.
MobiWatch contended that its market research showed that women kept their keys in their hand as a self-defense mechanism, which is why the M-PERS should be embedded in a key chain and not a feature on a mobile phone. That may be true, but the market and investors (MobiWatch was on the prowl for investors) proved otherwise.
Jitterbug’s phone service is aimed at those who are looking for a simple mobile phone experience. Their typical user is 55-years-old or older and not necessarily female, as opposed to MobiWatch’s planned demographic. One key benefit of small, PERS devices is that they typically have a longer battery life than the average mobile phone, however, MobiWatch’s device needed to be tethered to a mobile phone in order to work — so that benefit is irrelevant since the MobiFob can’t work without a charged phone.
MobiWatch clearly understood this as it also offered a one-touch, speed dial option for its users who preferred not to carry the MobiFob device along with their mobile phones. Jitterbug seems to believe that its users would prefer that set-up, too.
Does the acquisition of MobiWatch point to zero market opportunity for dedicated, personal emergency response medallions?
No. The next generation of M-PERS devices need to include network connectivity — not just short-range tethering. To become truly convenient for users they cannot require an extra device, especially since 90 percent of the U.S. population already has a mobile phone.
Qualcomm’s now defunct LifeComm business unit developed a MPERS that included the “guts” of a mobile phone but kept an eye on battery life. While that device has yet to come to market, the company has advertised the concept device at various health technology tradeshows, including the recent TEDMED event in San Diego last week. The question for that offering is whether consumers are willing to pay a subscription fee for that service or if there is another business model that would work.
For now, Jitterbug customers will have the opportunity to subscribe to MobiWatch’s repurposed MPERS offering, which will hit Jitterbug’s unique “Services Store” sometime next year, while the market opportunity for truly mobile, dedicated MPERS devices remains uncertain.
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| Jitterbug buys M-PERS start-up, MobiWatch
GreatCall, parent company to Jitterbug, the easy-to-use mobile phone service for seniors and others looking for simple phone service, has acquired mobile personal emergency response services company MobiWatch for an undisclosed sum.
Waltham, MA-based MobiWatch offered a keychain device that included an emergency button, which activated a Bluetooth connection with their cell phone which then connected to the emergency call center. The caller is then located via GPS and the call center can alert the police, ambulance or family members. The idea was similar to Onstar for cars.
As had been pointed out, MobiWatch intended to charge between $6 and $10 a month for a device and service that required a mobile phone already — sure, a button is easier to press than 9-1-1-SEND on a cell phone. Maybe not $10 bucks a month easier though.
According to Jitterbug’s press release, it seems to have no intention of carrying out MobiWatch’s business model: Jitterbug plans to integrate the service into its mobile phones. Sounds like MobiWatch’s offering will become another service in Jitterbug’s Services Store — its version of an App Store.
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AllOne Mobile goes retail: Walgreens, Krogers
AllOne Mobile, a mobile phone application developed by AllOne Health and secured by Diversinet, will become available on brick-and-mortar store shelves across the country next month as part of a package that includes a USB-based personal health record offering from Connectyx, called MedFlash. MedFlash already has distribution agreements with a number of grocery store chains and pharmacies, including Walgreens, Harris Teeter and Krogers. Online retailer Drugstore.com will also sell the packaged offering.
“This takes us from a three tiered platform that allows our members to access their PHR via our 24/7 800 number, flash drive or the Internet to a four tiered platform with the addition of the AllOne Mobile technology for our members,” Ronn Schuman, Connectyx president and CEO stated in a company press release.
According to the press release that announced the deal: This agreement marks the first time AllOne Mobile will be available for purchase in retail establishments. AllOne Mobile is already available to consumers through Microsoft’s HealthVault site.
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Diversinet: $1.63M Q3 mobile health revenues
Mobile security solutions provider Diversinet recently released its third quarter financial statements and once again the company announced more than $1.63 million in revenues from its licensing and revenue sharing agreement with wireless health service provider AllOne Health. Diversinet has been working with AllOne since the third quarter of 2008.
Diversinet’s technology secures “the personal identity, transactions and data of consumers” over many of the mobile phone platforms in the market today. AllOne Health’s mobile offering, AllOne Mobile is used in a pilot underway with the U.S. Army. AllOne also recently inked deals with Significa Insurance Group (Significa) and Erin Group Administrators (EGA). Significa and EGA members can now securely view, manage and exchange their health care information with physicians, hospitals, pharmacies and other health care providers anytime and anywhere, so long as they have their mobile device handy.
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| PEPFAR joins mHealth Alliance
During a keynote at the Foundation for the NIH’s mHealth Summit in Washington D.C. last week, Ambassador Eric Goosby announced that the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) had joined the mHealth Alliance, a consortium created by the Vodafone Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and the UN Foundation. PEPFAR is now a founding member of the Alliance.
PEPFAR’s participation in the mHealth Alliance will increase the use of mobile-based tools for treating and preventing HIV/AIDS in developing countries. Phones for Health, a public-private partnership led by PEPFAR: Phones-for-Health plans to “make timely, relevant information available to program managers and service providers, while also helping PEPFAR achieve its ambitious goals — to support treatment for 2 million HIV-infected people, support prevention of 7 million new infections, and support care for 10 million people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS in an accountable and sustainable way,” according to PEPFAR’s site.
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Smartphones increase trust among doctors?
“It is amazing how much this technology begins to change culture. When communications and information flow are limited, too often a culture of distrust develops. But with improved communications and information sharing, feelings of greater teamwork and collaboration soon follow,” Dr. Robert Murphy, Chief Medical Informatics Officer at The Memorial Hermann Healthcare System in Texas told the BBC during a recent interview. Murphy contends that since his 13 hospitals’ physicians began using iPhones and medical apps to improve collaboration, the trust among his physicians has increased.
Of course, uptake of smartphones among physicians — Manhattan Research estimates 64 percent of all physicians in the U.S. use a smartphone today and more than 80 percent will by 2012 — has its benefits, but patient groups believe the devices pose an increased threat to patient privacy, too:
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Magic and mHealth at TEDMED and mHS09
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Jeffrey L. Sturchio, President and CEO of the Global Health Council declared at the Foundation for the NIH’s mHealth Summit (mHS09) in Washington D.C. last week. Sturchio noted that the quote is a famous statement made by British physicist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Sturchio explained that after attending case study presentations at the Summit for the past two days, it seemed to him that the mHealth pilots and programs taking place here and in developing countries were nothing short of magic.
Earlier that morning, during his keynote presentation, Ambassador Eric Goosby, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator for the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, urged attendees not to pursue wireless health services because they are a “shiny new technology” or because they are “innovative, creative and flashy,” but rather because, if they do improve health outcomes for patients, then they should be core tools for medical workers and global health programs.
Sturchio and Goosby both have it right. Continue >>
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Toumaz, CareFusion trial sensor at St. Mary’s
UK-based wireless body area monitoring cmompany Toumaz has begun a clinical trial of its peel-and-stick body monitoring system, Sensium, at London’s St. Mary’s Hospital. The trial is sponsored by Toumaz’s U.S. partner CareFusion.
Toumaz’s Sensium wireless band-aids continuously monitor patients’ vital signs, including skin temperature, heart rate and respiration.
Toumaz founder Chris Toumazou described the company’s plans in a recent press release: “The business case is simple: by using the disposable digital plaster to monitor on a 24-7 basis, critical medical information can be monitored that would not otherwise have been detected. This preventative form of medicine will mean that less people could require intensive care in the future, saving lives and at the same time providing greater efficiencies and cost savings to the NHS. Once proven in a hospital setting then the digital plaster can be deployed in the home in the same way.”
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Roche inks deal with sleep monitoring start-up
As we hinted last week, Wireless sensor and neuropathology start-up NeuroVigil has inked a deal with Swiss pharamceutical company Roche. NeuroVigil will provide Roche with its iBrain wireless sensors to help the company collect and analyze data during its clinical trials. NeuroVigil technology will be used to help the company’s development of various drugs for CNS disorders. The iBrain devices are portable and noninvasive peel-and-stick wireless sensors that monitor neural activity during outpatient clinical trials.
NeuroVigil will analyze each patient’s data using its proprietary algorithms and brain-derived biomarker libraries. These analytics aim to help “Roche to detect subtle individual changes in brain activity at very low drug dosages, often before the onset of cognitive symptoms and adverse effects,” according to the companies’ press release.
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Philips: $148.3B global home healthcare market
Philips has inked a deal with the largest health insurer in the Netherlands, Achmea, for a pilot home healthcare project that could eventually become rolled out across Europe. Philips’ goal is to help doctors monitor patients’ health remotely but to also equip patients with respiratory diseases with products help them better manage their conditions at home.
Philips estimates that the global market for home healthcare is about 100 billion euros (about $148.3B) and the company is looking to target about 5 percent of the market. One of the drivers of Philips continued push into home healthcare is the growing population of people over the age of 65, which will increase to 50 percent of the population in the EU by 2050.
“We need devices that collect information about the patient, an infrastructure to get that information to the physician or provide software that can triage that data and thus enable the physician to focus on patients that need attention,” Walter van Kuijen, general manager at Philips’ home monitoring healthcare told Reuters.
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WebMD: Medscape Mobile, 200K+ downloads
During its third quarter conference call this week, WebMD announced that its Medscape Mobile iPhone application, which it launched in July, has already been downloaded more than 200,000 times. Medscape Mobile is an app the company created for physicians, but WebMD said the total number of downloads for its consumer iPhone apps now tops 1 million downloads — and its first consumer iPhone app was launched less than a year ago.
“We’re also investing into markets for the future as we see the market going more mobile and more global,” WebMD President and CEO Wayne Gattinella said during the call. ”Our WebMD mobile health applications for consumers was launched on the iPhone less than a year ago, and they have already generated over 1 million downloads, consistently ranking at the top of the app store for health applications.”
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Sleep deprivation; Bluetooth; Tips for adherence
To sleep, perchance to dream: Nearly one-third of Americans get fewer than seven hours of sleep each night, according to a recent CDC survey. Upwards to 70 million Americans might be classified as having chronic sleep or wakefulness disorders, according to the study. While many of these restless sleeper will not turn to the healthcare system for help, there seems to be a growing interest in sleep disorders in wireless health. At the recent TEDMED event the West Wireless Health Institute’s Dr. Eric Topol referenced a consumer health start-up, Zeo, which created an alarm clock that connects to peel-and-stick sensors the user wears to bed. The system helps users understand their sleep patterns better. Another start-up, NeuroVigil, was featured at TEDMED, as co-founder Philip Low presented on his company’s EEG monitoring system which works with many mobile phones and his company’s single lead sensor. More on the CDC study here.
Suped up Bluetooth: An engineering team in India has created a modified Bluetooth with telemedicine in mind: “DICOM images of approximately 1.5 megabytes can be transferred using their modified Bluetooth system in just 120 seconds, compared with 400 seconds for standard Bluetooth.” Their paper will be published in the next issue of the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics. More
The five-pronged approach for increasing medication adherence: RAND and Avalere Health held a conference with about 40 medication adherence experts this past July. Following the meeting, the group published a five-prong approach for increasing medication adherence: Quality Improvement, Care Coordination, Health IT, Patient/Provider Education and Engagement, Health Services Research. While we have written about a number of companies working on medication adherence: Vitality, Jitterbug, MedMinder and many more — Novartis CEO Dan Vasella reminded us earlier this year that health IT alone won’t solve medication adherence. Despite that, Novartis isn’t shunning the tech side of adherence either: The company recently inked a deal with intelligent medicine start-up Proteus Biomedical. Here’s more on the five tips for adherence.
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