December 17th, 2011 by Felasfa Wodajo, M.D. in News
One of the major announcements at last week’s mHealth Summit was made by Qualcomm who introduced a new platform for wirelessly connecting medical devices. The 2net platform abstracts away the details of connecting a sensor to a cloud-based server.
Right now, if a company develops a great lightweight sensor to measure, say, walking speed, it will also have to engineer a way for that information to be transferred wirelessly, sometimes across a couple of stops, to its eventual destination somewhere on a server. Although these same challenges repeat for every device, each company has to “reinvent the wheel”.
Additionally, once it arrives at the company’s servers that rich collection of data would still be isolated – in a “data silo”. If another company comes along with a terrific heart rate sensor and suggests, “why don’t we combine the two data streams and make a useful new app”, not only would they have to recreate the entire chain of communication for themselves, the two companies would have to agree to methods for their two servers to talk and share information.
2Net makes almost all of the above problems go away. It opens up a world of seamlessly connected wireless devices that allows application developers and sensor designers to concentrate on their work and “outsource” all the communication and data storage needs. Already within the Qualcomm pavilion on the exhibit floor, there were already several companies taking advantage of the new “2net” platform.
This is a big deal.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op_bOh6F7oY[/youtube]
