Every year in this industry, some market segments seem to attract more attention and move faster than others. One of the sectors that reached hot market status this year is medical electronics. By itself, medical imaging is an $18 billion global market. Parks Associates, which tracks the industry, estimates that the total digital home health market in the U.S. will grow at an average annual rate of 36% and turn into a $2.1 billion industry in 2010 (Fig. 1). Most of this growth will be driven by the rapid expansion of wellness monitoring programs and online patient-physician messaging services.
Several wireless OEMs and chip manufactures have already identified healthcare electronics as a fast-growing market and have been quick to respond. Microchip Technology and Texas Instruments have formed vertical business units to develop products that serve the specific needs of the medical community.
Traditional consumer electronics (CE) OEMs—relying on their skills in developing highly miniaturized products, their brands, and their distribution—are also testing the market. Together with medical device manufactures, they're bringing new meaning to the term "personal electronics."
In an industry where attractive design and miniaturization are prized features, some consumer electronics traditionalists were nonetheless surprised when the Oticon A/S Delta digital hearing device won a Best of Innovations Design and Engineering Award at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show (Fig. 2).
Michael Barrett, clinical associate professor of medicine and cardiologist at Temple University School of Medicine and Hospital, recently reported at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology that doctors can improve their ability to diagnose heart problems by listening repeatedly to heartbeats on their iPods.
Previous research has shown the average rate of correct heart sound identification by physicians is 40%. In a new study, 149 general internists listened to five common heart murmurs 400 times during a 90-minute session with iPods. After the session, the average score improved to 80%.
Wireless Healthcare, a U.K.-based industry analyst, predicts the market for consumer electronics-based therapeutic and well-being devices and services will grow 20% annually and could be worth $4 billion per year by 2010. It says many of the products coming out of the CE community will be designed specifically to remotely monitor mostly aging patients and conduct online ECG analysis.
Microsoft announced last summer that it would offer software for healthcare applications. It hired 40 members of a Washington Hospital Center team—including two of the team's doctors—that developed a healthcare information system.
Greg Haubrich, a Technical Fellow at Medtronic, says several trends will lead to new wireless products for healthcare, like the development of smaller RF transceivers that consume less battery power. "There is an expanding universe of medical applications that can make beneficial use of wireless connectivity," says Haubrich.
Doctors can already keep electronic tabs on heart failure symptoms, detecting subtle increases in weight and blood pressure and summoning patients to a hospital before they're even aware that anything is wrong. Boston Scientific's Latitude patient management system, for example, enables doctors to wirelessly monitor specific information on heart patients. Several technical standards organizations are working to enable interoperability between comparable systems.
The Continua Health Alliance was formed last year as an open-industry group to establish an ecosystem of connected personal health and fitness products and services. Comprising mostly industry companies—including Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, Medtronic, Motorola, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, and Sharp Electronics—it's working to establish standards for personal health systems.
"We are creating an organization where several seemingly disparate industries can work together to combine their products and services through connectivity standards and provide millions of people with the tools they need to better manage their health and the health of their families," says David Whitlinger, chairman of the alliance and director of healthcare device standards at Intel.
Also last year, the Bluetooth SIG (special interest group) formed the Medical Devices Working Group to create and ratify the Bluetooth Medical Device Profile, which will expand the use of Bluetooth technology into the medical, health, and fitness markets. The completed profile is expected to run on all current versions of Bluetooth technology.
Headed by Robert Hughes, a senior wireless standards architect in Intel's Digital Health Group, the group anticipates the development of Bluetooth devices in blood pressure monitors, weight scales, pulse oximeters, glucose, pulse/heart rate monitors, and thermometers. An initial profile could be available as early as the third quarter of this year, according to Hughes.
The ISO/IEEE 11073 Personal Health Data Working Group also hopes to release a set of standards that address transport-independent application and information profiles between personal telehealth devices and monitors by the end of this year. And the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is doing its part, initiating steps to establish a new service for advanced medical radio communications (known as MedRadio) devices in the 401- to 406-MHz band.
The FCC has proposed designating an additional 2 MHz of spectrum for these devices, from 401 to 402 MHz and 405 to 406 MHz, adjacent to the existing Medical Implant Communications Service (MICS) band from 402 to 405 MHz, for a total of 5 MHz specifically assigned to medical device communications. To accommodate a wider variety of devices than the current MICS service, which is limited to the use of implant devices, the FCC also has proposed allowing the use of body-worn transmitting devices in the MedRadio service.
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