November: Wireless health rising
 This past week was a big one for wireless health — on all fronts. Here’s how the week’s news broke down:
Clinicians: Mt. Sinai and Mayo Clinic each forged ahead with wireless remote monitoring tools and patient-facing mobile applications. A team at Mt. Sinai worked on a pilot program with with wireless health start-up CareSpeak that used text message reminders to increase the rate of adherence among young liver transplant patients to their medication regimen. Meanwhile, the Mayo Clinic announced that it had been working with STMicroelectronics to create a wireless, remote cardiac monitoring system.
Consumer: BestBuy announced that 40 of its US stores now carried personal health technology products, including pedometers, blood pressure monitors, connected weight scales, heart rate monitors and more. The news followed last week’s deal between AllOne Health and MedFlash that brought AllOne Mobile into retail locations including Walgreens, Harris Teeter and more.
Policy: “One really promising area that we all should be focusing on is the area of mobile health,” White House Deputy Director for Policy in the Office of Science and Technology Tom Kalil said at a luncheon in DC. Seems wireless health has been a topic of discussion in the White House recently. Kalil said that the Administration is now trying to determine what “ambitious” but “realistic” goals we should be setting to use wireless technologies to solve national challenges, including healthcare. Meanwhile, the Continua Health Alliance discussed its efforts to include remote patient monitoring in the healthcare reform bill, which passed the House this week.
Efficacy: Of course, the push for wireless health solutions will find success if the industry can suss out which wireless health tools actually improve outcomes. Clinical trials like the one Mt. Sinai and Carespeak conducted are an important step in the process toward proven efficacy – MobiHealthNews rounded up 10 other wireless health clinical trials from around the world that also aimed to determine the efficacy of various wireless health systems. The GSM Association also announced an agreement with the University of Manchester to set-up an mHealth Innovation Center in Machester, UK, which aims to facilitate clinical trials and become a hub for wireless health activity in the United Kingdom.
The “space between clinical and fitness” — that was the way I described the wireless health sweet spot a few months ago: Now, the two poles of the wireless health spectrum have begun to creep more closely into the center, wireless health is making its way into the national health reform discussion as clinical trials continue around the world.
It may be November, but this week’s news cycle clearly proves that the wireless health industry has no plans to hibernate this winter.
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| Best Buy brings health tech to 40 U.S. stores
Best Buy announced today that 40 of its stores in the U.S. have begun offering personal health solutions devices like pedometers, Bluetooth-enabled weight scales and blood pressure monitors.
“New technologies are emerging daily to help people plan, monitor, and enhance their health and fitness activities,” Best Buy stated in its press release. “Yet finding the ways and the time to stay fit and motivated can seem more complicated than ever before. Starting today, Best Buy customers in select markets from Washington, DC to Denver can turn to the nation’s largest consumer electronics retailer for help in satisfying their health and fitness equipment and management needs.”
While the personal health products are only available at a fraction of Best Buy’s stores: Some customers in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Mexico and Texas now have “more than 30 feet of technology devices organized by popular activities such as running, walking, swimming, and yoga, as well as fitness equipment” in some 40 stores.
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Mt. Sinai, CareSpeak text transplant patients
“If we can save one patient from needing another transplant, we’ve saved a life and at least a half-million dollars. The investment is relatively little and the benefit enormous.” Dr. Tamir Miloh, assistant professor of pediatrics and surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. The investment? Text message reminders for teenage liver transplant patients.
Miloh and his team at Mt. Sinai worked on a pilot program with with CareSpeak that aimed to increase the rate of adherence among young liver transplant patients to their medication regimen. The medication schedule for the program’s 41 patients ranged from three different pills once a day to three different pills twice a day.
Results from Mt. Sinai
According to a report in the journal, Pediatrics, investigators concluded that the text message reminders did in fact increase adherence to regimens, but more importantly it led to better outcomes: While 12 of the 41 patients had experienced rejection episodes during the year before starting the program, only two patients had such an episode during the program.
How CareSpeak works
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Mayo Clinic, STM’s wireless cardiac monitor
STMicroelectronics has inked a deal with Mayo Clinic to collaborate on a wireless remote monitoring system for patients with chronic cardiovascular diseases. An initial program of patient trials is already underway, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Details about the offering are still sketchy, but the initial press release explains that STM contributed its “advanced sensor, microprocessor and communication products” to the collaboration while Mayo Clinic offered its medical expertise. The monitoring system includes “a combination of sensors, ultra-low-power microcontroller and wireless modules, and interfaces to provide information about the patient’s heart rate, breathing rate, physical activity and other measurements wirelessly obtained from external medical devices.” No word on what specific external medical devices are used in conjunction with the system.
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| Interview: TripleTree Research Dir. Chris Hoffman
TripleTree recently announced the availability of its latest research report: Wireless and Mobile Health Report, a follow-up to its classic Telemedicine 2.0 report from 2007, which we still reference because of its helpful categorization of the wireless health market. TripleTree’s latest report is likely to be even more useful (and it’s free — register for a copy here.)
While previous reports focused on the financials: venture capital, market opportunities and deals; the latest report from TripleTree focuses on the drivers, solutions and challenges facing wireless health. It also outlines opportunities and activities ongoing in developing markets. Much of the analysis TripleTree conducted was based on questionnaires filled out by hundreds of wireless health start-ups. These companies filled out the surveys in order to enter Triple Tree’s I Awards competition this past spring.
MobiHealthNews had a chance to speak to TripleTree’s Senior Principal & Research Director Chris Hoffman to discuss the Wireless and Mobile Health Report:
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Continua pushed RPM in healthcare reform bill
The engineering publication EDN did some digging into lobbying efforts by the Continua Health Alliance and how the group’s executive director and his team convinced lawmakers to include remote monitoring in the healthcare bill, which recently passed the House of Representatives and has moved to the Senate. We had heard from many larger tech companies in the wireless health industry that Continua’s alliance of more than 220 companies was one of the primary lobbying groups actively working to get wireless health and remote patient monitoring into the healthcare reform bill:
“And technology companies are lobbying to get particular technologies into the bills being considered. For example, the Continua Health Alliance, a group of more than 220 healthcare and technology companies, was originally formed to develop interoperability guidelines for health monitoring technology. Lately, however, it has become more active in promoting remote monitoring technology in the healthcare reform debate," said Charles Parker, Continua’s executive director.
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White House: Wireless health is really promising
“We’re in the adolescence of the mobile and wireless revolution,” White House Deputy Director for Policy in the Office of Science and Technology Tom Kalil declared during a presentation at the Mobile Future luncheon in Washington D.C. this week. Kalil explained that wireless technology could help improve (and in some cases has already improved) the U.S. education system, the U.S. healthcare system and the country’s push for a carbon-neutral energy system.
“One really promising area that we all should be focusing on is the area of mobile health,” Kalil said. “Researchers at the West Wireless Health Institute based in San Diego have identified potential applications in Alzheimer’s (by measuring vital signs, location and activity); asthma (respiratory rate); diabetes (blood glucose and hemoglobin); hypertension (blood pressure); and sleep disorders.”
Kalil said that the Administration is now trying to determine what “ambitious” but “realistic” goals we should be setting to use wireless technologies to solve national challenges, including healthcare. Kalil said that part of that discussion needs to examine legal and regulatory barriers; consider establishing prizes like the Android Developer challenge; fund research to determine the benefits of these solutions; and create fora for multi-sector collaboration, like the mHealth Alliance, which is a partnership between Vodafone Foundation, UN Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation to support wireless health initiatives in developing markets.
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10 Wireless health clinical trials
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has an online database called ClinicalTrials.gov that includes a registry of federally and privately supported clinical trials underway or completed. The database currently boasts more than 81,000 clinical trials from some 170 countries. As you might expect a couple dozen of those trials are testing wireless health solutions — mostly mobile phone applications — and their efficacy on health outcomes. MobiHealthNews rounded up 10 mobile phone-equipped clinical trials conducted by numerous academic institutions, world governments and big brand healthcare companies like AstraZeneca.
It is often said that wireless health solutions and healthcare mobile applications will not secure reimbursement or market uptake until they are proven to produce positive health outcomes. In the pages that follow, we have collected the studies underway or completed that are evaluating wireless health. Mine them for partners, processes and applications — and be sure to give us your take on the solutions in these trials — do they represent what’s market ready? Do they point to the future of wireless health?
View the wireless health clinical trials >>
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Video interviews from TEDMED, mHS09
Earlier this month the MobiHealthNews team was on-site at the TEDMED conference in San Diego and the Foundation for the NIH’s mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C. where we met with a number of wireless health lumiaries, including Contagion Health’s Jen McCabe; Frontline SMS:Medic’s Josh Nesbit; West Wireless Health Institute’s Gary West, Mehran Mehregany and Dr. Eric Topol; and Qualcomm’s Don Jones. We asked each of these wireless health experts a few questions about the events or current trends in the industry.
While at TEDMED, MobiHealthNews also captured a quick demo of Philips Electronics’ recently launched activity monitor, DeviceLink.
Continue on for a slideshow of the video interviews and demo from TEDMED and mHS09 earlier this month.
View the video slideshow >>
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GSMA’s vision for European wireless health
The GSM Association announced a partnership with the University of Manchester in the UK to establish an m-Health Innovation Centre in the city of Manchester. The center will have a UK focus, according to the two groups. The center aims to promote healthier lifestyles and early intervention to better health outcomes. From the release:
“The Manchester m-Health Innovation Centre will conduct multidisciplinary research, bringing together researchers, healthcare organisations and industrial partners to conceive, develop and evaluate mobile health innovations. A major focus will be on citizen-led health and wellbeing, using mobile technology to enable people to play a more active role in determining their own health, providing a more personalised and responsive interface to public services. The initiative recognises that innovative health products are important because they can help reduce the cost of healthcare as well as create new growth opportunities for the mobile industry,”
The new center will provide a forum for sharing ideas, in-depth analysis of the market for wireless health, facilitation of pilot trials as well as mHealth education and training.
For more read the group’s press release here
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Microskia: Another mobile phone microscope
An engineer at UCLA has created a substitute for microscopes by using about $10 of off-the-shelf hardware and a mobile phone. Aydogan Ozcan has already formed a start-up, Microskia, around the new device.
Ozcan imagines the devices being used for screening in the field — locations outside of hospitals, far from technicians or diagnostic labs, he told the New York Times in a recent interview. Clearly, the device would be incredibly beneficial for many global health markets.
Ozcan imagines the devices being used for screening in the field — locations outside of hospitals, far from technicians or diagnostic labs, he told the New York Times in a recent interview. Clearly, the device would be incredibly beneficial for many global health markets.
“In one prototype, a slide holding a finger prick of blood can be inserted over the phone’s camera sensor. The sensor detects the slide’s contents and sends the information wirelessly to a hospital or regional health center. For instance, the phones can detect the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood cells, a sign of infection, he said.”
That scenario makes one wonder if these devices will even find their way into the consumer health market. Here’s how Miscroskia’s device works:
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Doctors’ phones to record coughs, diagnose
Health workers know the difference between a wet cough and a dry cough; between a productive or non-productive; and between a voluntary and involuntary cough. If one Bedford, MA-based start-up, STAR Analytical Services succeeds, soon health workers will be able to use their smartphones to diagnose patients by recording and automatically analyzing their coughs instead.
STAR Analytical Services’s Suzanne Smith: ”Why haven’t we been measuring coughs? It’s the most common symptom when a patient presents, and we are relying on doctors and nurses with good old technology from the 19th century,” Smith told the Telegraph in a recent interview.
STAR’s software would record a patient’s cough and compare it to a database of pre-recorded coughs that include the sounds of respiratory diseases from people of both sexes, and various ages, weights, etc. The database only has several dozen patients’ coughs on record right now, but they estimate they will need about 1,000 before the software becomes reliable.
While the application currently runs on a computer, STAR anticipates that it will be able to create a smartphone application, too. The company created the system with a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
For more, see the Telegraph article here
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Shorts: MobileBeyond, Proteus, Halo and more
MobiHealthNews on MobileBeyond: Brian Prows, host of the MobileBeyond podcast, was kind enough to invite me onto his show to discuss wireless health. The conversation covered a lot of ground, including wireless remote monitoring, medical applications for smartphones, wireless sensors, care providers mobile portals, consumer health, the “Silver Tsunami” and more. Be sure to check out other interviews on MobileBeyond, too — here’s site’s main hub.
Slate Magazine calls Proteus Biomedical’s medication adherence system a “Jewish mother in your cell phone.” Have to read the article for more.
Halo Monitoring: “We developed myHalo with the goal of allowing seniors the option of living at home for as long as possible. Many nursing home admissions are for low level care needs and we believe that many of these admissions can be diverted or avoided all together with the use of proper remote monitoring tools,” said Chris Otto, cofounder of Halo Monitoring. Halo said it has expanded its product offering — here’s the release.
A video interview between BNET.tv and AllOne Health SVP Daniel Lewis recently hit YouTube. The interview took place at CTIA WIT & E, where we had our Everywhere Healthcare summit. Lewis was one of our speakers. Here’s Lewis explaining what AllOne Mobile is and does: Video.
Even More:
Fall prevention: Wireless sensors to the rescue
Nokia, MIT envision 2011 emergency response
How wireless has changed remote monitoring
Analyst: Compensate hospitals for lost revs
GSMA to establish mHealth innovation center
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