Beaverton,
Ore. – Continua Health
Alliance, an international not-for-profit organization of healthcare and
technology companies dedicated to creating an eco-system of interoperable
personal connected health products and services, today announced it will make
its Design Guidelines publicly available for download free of charge. (This
public availability will follow an internal 8 month interoperability/pilot
phase that will collect and issue errata prior to the public availability).
Public access to the Continua
Design Guidelines will help a larger number of developers build end-to-end
systems that provide seamless connectivity between personal connected health
products and services, facilitating critical interoperability among devices and
applications to drive down data collection and management costs to
significantly streamline and simplify the development process for technology
companies.
“Allowing a large audience to access Continua Guidelines
will be healthy for the industry” said Clint McClellan, Continua Board
President and Sr. Dir. of Strategic Marketing, Qualcomm Life, Inc. “This is a
vital step in enabling a collaborative system of interoperable plug-and-play healthcare
technologies, that will ultimately decrease time-to-market and drive down
deployment and maintenance costs – core components of Continuas mission.”
The Alliance recently made
its 2011 Design Guidelines available to university students as part of its
commitment to support the 2011-2012 GSMA Mobile Health
University Challenge. Having access to Continuas Guidelines has allowed
University Challenge participants the opportunity to accelerate their
application development by rapidly integrating a wide variety of Continua
compliant health and medical devices.
Continua will make the 2011 Guidelines available as a free download
in April of this year.
Continua Momentum
Continua wrapped up 2011 with a significant increase in Continua Certified™
products and a number of exciting new announcements:
- Android 4.0 was
released with the Bluetooth Health Device Profile which supports Continua
Certified devices such as heart-rate monitors, glucose meters, blood pressure
cuffs, thermometers, and scales. This is the first time that applications can
be loaded into an unmodified Mobile OS with the levels of security needed for
healthcare data transactions. - Demand for Continua Certified products increased with the Japanese
Tsunami disaster relief efforts and the recent launch of Continua-compliant
personal connected healthcare technologies and regional partnership solutions
in Japan.
There were commercial releases of Continua-based consumer solutions and
government-backed use of the Continua technology in two programs in 2011. - Continua began collaborating
with NFC Forum to expand connectivity, simplify data exchange in healthcare IT.
Continua is working to include NFC as a new transport in an upcoming release of
the Guidelines. - The Alliance
launched
the Continua-India work group at International Telemedicine Congress 2011. This
new regional working group is focused on adoption and promotion of Continua
within India.
This new working group now joins formal regional working groups in – China, Europe, Japan,
South Korea, United States
and our Emerging Markets working group.
“We are extremely happy that the Bluetooth Health Device
Profile is included in Android 4.0,” said McClellan, “this will make it much
easier for third parties to develop health applications that can use a wide
variety of Continua certified devices. We are also seeing increasing
international adoption of Continua as the Japanese government has mandated that
relief efforts should use Continua-based systems to ensure rapid and effective
clinic deployments. And, because of increasing interest in India, we have formed a dedicated India work
group to facilitate adoption of Continua based systems. “
Consumer Electronics Show
Continua and member
companies AnyDATA, Bluegiga, Freescale,
Nonin,
Qualcomm
Life, Renesas, STMicroelectronics,
Texas
Instruments (TI) and Wind River are demonstrating
personal connected health solutions this week, Jan. 10-13 at the 2012
International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Visit us in the
North Hall Digital
Health Summit (Booth #3027), to see consumer digital health solutions in
action.
About Continua: Continua Health Alliance is an international
not-for-profit industry organization dedicated to establishing guidelines for
combining and applying existing standards to personal connected health products
and services. Continua makes a transition from the personal connected health
marketplace to a marketplace of interoperable devices that facilitate better
care, possible, empowering consumers, improving outcomes and lowering overall
healthcare costs. With nearly 250 member companies around the world, Continua
is comprised of technology, medical device and healthcare industry leaders as
well as service providers dedicated to making personal connected health a
reality. For more information visit: www.continuaalliance.org.
Posted by Sean Fenske, Editor-in-Chief, MDT