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The Continua Health Alliance has developed a set of standards and protocols to facilitate communication between different medical devices. This was meant to allow various manufacturers to create devices that would automatically be compatible with those from other firms. Cambridge Consultants has now teamed up with Qualcomm to create a standard wireless unit that can communicate data from a Continua certified device to remote servers. This technology, in one swoop, may allow for any compatible device to be used in telemedicine applications.

The new, low-cost platform is a combination of Qualcomm Incorporated’s Wearable Mobile Device cellular module and Cambridge Consultants’ Vena software stack. The platform enables the collection of data from Continua certified devices over the Continua Personal Area Network (PAN) interface, and transmits this data over the Continua Wide Area Network (WAN) interface* to on-line health services. The Wearable Mobile Device module has dimensions of 21 x 22 x 4.5mm, enabling a Continua Application Hosting Device (AHD) to be built that provides a PAN-to-WAN bridge within a small highly portable footprint.

Cambridge Consultants’ Vena wireless healthcare software stack, which implements the standards selected by the Continua Health Alliance, empowers patients to manage health and wellness anytime, anywhere. It embeds the Bluetooth™ Health Device Profile (HDP) optimized for the secure transport of medical data and the IEEE 11073 standards for compatible exchange of information between health devices.

The Qualcomm Wearable Mobile Device 1X, 1X EV-DO and UMTS modules are industry-leading products that support a variety of 3G networks and provide integrated GPS, an accelerometer and Bluetooth technologies. With data and voice support, a standardized USB 2.0 interface and defined APIs and development kit, the modules provide unprecedented functionality and streamlined 3G connectivity for M2M and CE devices.

Press release: New Cambridge Consultants platform brings mobile health one step closer …

Imagine having a metal detector handy when you, as an emergency physician, have an unconscious patient come in and you need to know whether he has an implant. Well, you can sort of do it now with the Metal Detector app for Android phones that have magnetometers (ex: HTC T-Mobile G1). It won’t do quite yet, as the magnetometer that’s typically used as a compass isn’t strong enough to detect keys more than an a couple inches away. But as a preview, we can imagine having one of these apps handy on a future, more magnetically endowed, smart phone.

Cell phones may soon be able to detect carbon monoxide and other dangerous toxins found in gasoline and chemical warfare agents using a tiny silicon chip sensing system developed by researchers at UCSD and Rhevision, Inc. Embedded within the silicon sensor are hundreds of separate spots that can change color in response to specific chemicals. By capturing the pattern of color changes using a new kind of supermacro lens, researchers at UCSD plan to create a versatile sensor small enough to fit into a cell phone that can recognize a wide variety of chemical hazards.

From the press release:

Already their chips can distinguish between methyl salicylate, a compound used to simulate the chemical warfare agent mustard gas, and toluene, a common additive in gasoline. Potentially, they could discriminate among hundreds of different compounds and recognize which might be harmful.

“The beauty of this technology is that the number of sensors contained in one of our arrays is determined by the pixel resolution of the cell phone camera. With the megapixel resolution found in cell phone cameras today, we can easily probe a million different spots on our silicon sensor simultaneously. So we don’t need to wire up a million individual sensors,” Sailor [Michael Sailor, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSD] said. “We only need one. This greatly simplifies the manufacturing process because it allows us to piggyback on all the technology development that has gone into making cell phone cameras lighter, smaller, and cheaper.”

Press release: Cell Phone Sensors for Toxins Developed at UC San Diego…