Google may turn out to be a major player in mobile and wireless health after all.

Less than two months after the Internet search leader announced it was shutting down its overhyped, underadopted Google Health personal health records platform, comes the news that Google is paying $12.5 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility. (Is anyone surprised by this? I was at first, until I stepped back and realized that probably was the reason Motorola Inc. split into two companies back at the beginning of the year, handset cable TV set-top box and gadget manufacturer Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions, which enterprise and business networking technology.)

Ostensibly the deal is to give Google some of Motorola Mobility's nearly 17,000 patents to help protect against lawsuits related to Android smartphones, but look what Motorola has going in healthcare.

No, I'm not talking about ruggedized, disinfectable smartphone handsets for hospital environments. The line of "enterprise digital assistants" actually is from Motorola Solutions, the part of Motorola that Google is not buying.

Sure, the more commercially oriented Android handsets and tablets that Motorola Mobility makes could play a role in healthcare, but come on, let's face it, the iPad rules the tablet market among physicians right now, and the healthcare smartphone market is dominated by iPhone among individuals—and the occasional medical school—and BlackBerry at the enterprise level. Sure, Android smartphones and tablets could make inroads in the future, but that may be small potatoes compared to the potential the Google-Motorola combination has in connected health.

Late last year, the Motorola Mobility division bought a little company called 4Home, maker of what the company calls "connected home services." This includes energy management (ironic, because Google also axed a service called Google PowerMeter at the time it announced the wind-down of Google Health), home security monitoring, remote controls of TV, DVRs and other media devices and, yes, home health monitors.

Motorola Mobility also includes the company's still-lucrative business in set-top cable TV boxes. Now, the TV could become the same kind of control hub for home health monitoring as the smartphone or the tablet. Take your pick. Convenience is always a winner.

Meanwhile, Motorola also has a few connected health devices already on the market. As GigaOM pointed out this week, the Libertyville, Ill.-based company already sells baby monitors. But the real potential is in monitoring of the elderly and chronically ill as an alternative to hospitalization, nursing homes and long-term care—the so-called aging-in-place market.

Once this deal closes, Google will have a multifaceted platform for remote patient monitoring, to me, a much more promising business than a patient-controlled data storage product like Google Health. Google also will have the clout, if it so chooses, to push forward clinical trials and lean on payers to make the case for reimbursing for home monitoring devices.

That's where the money is and, more importantly, the lifestyle improvement is. Direct-to-consumer PHRs and fitness-related apps are interesting, but they're niche products often in search of a market. The bulk of our healthcare spending comes from chronic disease and eldercare. By purchasing Motorola Mobility, Google now is poised to make a major splash in that utterly important sector.