While Apple, Google and even Microsoft have grabbed mHealth headlines in the last several months, two tech giants with just as much street cred haven’t gotten as much attention of late.
Samsung and Qualcomm are already squarely targeting healthcare providers while the aforementioned IT stalwarts are, bluntly stated, just starting down that road.
Take Apple HealthKit, for instance. The most popular apps integrating with HealthKit include a calorie counter, step tracker and life coach, WebMD for the iPhone, instant heart rate monitor and Weight Watchers Mobile. Those are well and good, but when compared to Qualcomm 2net — a clinical healthcare and FDA-registered medical device platform targeted at high-risk patients — the benefits of Weight Watchers Mobile pale.
Let’s take a closer look at these platforms.
Qualcomm Life 2net
The Qualcomm Life 2net platform offers solutions primarily for transition to home care where patients still must be monitored, according to Rick Valencia, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm Life.
"We assume the user is the type of person who may not even have a cell phone," Valencia added.
The 2net device sits in the user's home, not unlike any Wi-Fi access point but with multiple radios built in, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a USB port. The hotspot creates a medical grid network with a secure medical grade connection, through which 2net can connect with a variety of third-party medical devices. The collected data is sent to the Qualcomm cloud over the cellular network.
"The medical healthcare provider tells us the format they need the data in and we send that data to that system," Valencia said.
While 2net is a data capture platform designed to collect data outside the hospital, transfering it back to the Qualcomm data warehouse and then sending it on to the customer system, Healthy Circles is the second component of Qualcomm's solution. It's designed to share records with a care team, which could include a dietitian, general practitioner waiting for biometric data or specialist in need of lab results.
"It's almost like Facebook in the sense anyone can be invited in, and being a cloud or software-as-a-service solution enables users to gain access through a Web link once the identity of the requester is approved,” Valencia said.
The Qualcomm solution does not provide analytics; rather, it offers decision support by using exception management where anomalies in the data (with the safe ranges provided by the healthcare team) are used to create alerts.
Last year, a 2013 Qualcomm Life collaborator Cystelcom enacted a year-long study in Spain using its mHealthAlert platform and Qualcomm Life’s 2net hub to monitor 30 COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) patients. mHealthAlert is a platform designed to improve telemonitoring for elderly and chronic patients in their own homes. The use of this monitoring device, with the 2net Hub to deliver readings to the care team, resulted in a 69 percent reduction in hospital readmission rates, a 34 percent reduction in emergency entries and 30 percent reduction in length of hospital stays, according to officials. Consistent telemonitoring was also shown to reduce overall healthcare costs.
Samsung
Samsung is attempting to bring clarity to the muddy area between fitness, health and wellness and clinical apps with its Samsung Health Initiative, and it's looking to make mobile technology relevant to physicians, hospitals, payers and patients.
The Initiative has many moving parts, including the Simband Reference Design, a Simband Dashboard, and SAMI (Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions). These solutions aren't targeted at the consumer, but are designed to bring in healthcare partners who can develop finished products without having to reinvent secure mobile technology from the ground up.
To that end, Samsung has developed a unique charging mechanism referred to as a "shuttle battery." Before explaining how it works it is necessary to understand the Simband, a reference design for a wrist-worn mobile device that can include mix-and-match sensors, depending on the needs of the patient being monitored.
Worn in close proximity to the arteries, the Simband supplies the power and a secure communication link for companies developing and manufacturing their own sensors.
Some sensors are being designed by Samsung. A multiple photoplethysmogram is a PPG sensor that shines a light on the wearer's skin to measure changes in blood flow at the cardiovascular level, among other things. The Simband ECG measures rate and regularity of heartbeat. According to Samsung, they will be the first in the world to offer an open reference design platform that leverages bioimpedance to monitor everything from blood flow to body fat.
Rather than having to take the device off to recharge, the shuttle battery clips onto a Simband device magnetically, charging the Simband while the user sleeps.
The SAMI dashboard is used to display data such as heart rate and heart rate variability, skin temperature, oxygen level and carbon dioxide levels.
The software architecture will allow healthcare device developers to write mobile applications that aggregate the data collected from various sources. In terms of software, the SAMI cloud-based software architecture is open so that software companies can write apps that take advantage of SAMI’s ability to aggregate data from a variety of sources.
Samsung is also providing $50 million in seed funding for early-stage startup companies that are working on advanced sensor technology, algorithms and apps that use the open Simband and/or SAMI hardware and software platforms.
Like Qualcomm, Samsung's SAMI does not do analytics, per se. Rather, it's a platform designed to sit between devices that collect data and algorithms in the cloud that analyze that data.
"The idea is to make more information available, to break open information silos and give algorithms access to data," said Thomas Beermann, vice president of communications for Samsung's Strategy and Innovation Center.
The future: platforms
Some pundits are predicting that Apple, Google and Microsoft are gearing up for large-scale enterprise platforms in healthcare that will dramatically re-shape the industry and actually tie together clinicians, physicians and patients.
Qualcomm and Samsung also are doing their level best to clarify those relationships with data relevant to doctors and the people they treat.
But that's not the whole story. As we move along the path toward a wellness approach to medicine, we are surely beginning to understand that everything is, or soon will be, connected.
Ephraim Schwartz is a freelance writer based in Burlington, Vt. Schwartz is a recognized mobile expert and columnist, having spent 15 years as Editor-at-Large for InfoWorld, half of them covering the mobile space. Prior to that he was Editor-in-Chief of Laptop Magazine.
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