(TEST-2) @CTIA Seidenberg to Scripps, mHealth bubbles up

An Intel, GE wireless sensor partnership?

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Intel and General Electric are planning to announce a joint venture today that the companies are reportedly calling "health care reimagined." The report highlights GE's QuietCare service, which uses wireless motion sensors in homes to track the daily activities of patients in need of remote monitoring. The sensors then transmit that to servers and computers used by a remote healthcare staff.

For more on the rumored deal, read this WSJ article.

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Google Health now viewable on iPhone

An iPhone application developer has leveraged Google Health's API to create Health Cloud, an application for Apple's iPhone that gives users access to the information they have entered into their Google Health personal health record. Like the other Google Health readers for mobile phones that we have written about in the past, this one only allows users to access the information in a readable format; Health Cloud does not allow you to update your Google Health record. However, developer Ford Parsons is confident that this will change in the application's next version. Read on for more on Parson's ambitious agenda for Health Could v1.1.

@mHI: The 12 clusters of mHealth

The mHealth Initiative Spring Seminar here in Boston kicked off with about 30 attendees from various segments of the mobile health sector, including Google, Orlando Health, AllOne Mobile/Diversinet, Verizon Wireless and Nortel. After an introduction from The mHealth Initiative's President Claudia Tessier that included an explination of the difference between the mHI and her previous mobile health group, MoHCA, mHI Executive Director Peter Waegeman outlined the mHI's perspective on the twelve key clusters for mobile phone applications in healthcare.

@mHI: mHI's proposed mHealth project

The mHI's Executive Director Peter Waegemann unveiled more details this week about the mHI's proposed mHealth project. Waegemann explained that the project is not about mHealth specifically, but rather about increasing communications between patients and providers in general. The proposed project is designed to enable consumers in Boston or Seattle or Nashua, TN or others (or multiple cities) to:

Have their personal health record (PHR) on their mobile phone
Have a health record that includes all care givers, including the school nurse, the chiropractor and the clinician
Be able to manage chronic conditions with applications based on their mobile phone

Read on for more.

@ CTIA: Verizon on mHealth 4G

Verizon Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg announced yesterday at CTIA that Verizon Wireless is launching a new 4G innovation center for its next generation network in partnership with Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson. The center aims to foster products for the healthcare, utility and security verticals. Seidenberg said the center will follow the model of its Open Development Lab, which launched two years ago. The ODL has certified 36 devices to date, Seidenberg said, including a device for utility companies that monitors energy consumption and a wireless tablet for the healthcare industry, which helps clinicians access patient data in real-time from a portable medical chart. For more on Seidenberg's mention of mHealth at CTIA, read on.

@CTIA: 1 Trillion text messages in 2008

Yesterday at the CTIA wireless event in Las Vegas, CTIA President Steve Largent announced the latest metrics for mobile phone usage in the U.S. The numbers only reaffirm the mobile platform as the best one for interactive health applications. For a quick rundown of the latest wireless stats for U.S. subscribers, click here.

$45M for West Wireless Health Institute

Thanks to a $45 million gift from the Gary and Mary West Foundation and support from Qualcomm and Scripps Health, the newly formed West Wireless Health Institute in San Diego will work to take wireless medicine out of the lab and into the marketplace. Qualcomm's Vice President of Health and Life Sciences will serve as the institute's Founding Board Member while Scripps Health's Chief Academic Officer Eric Topol will be the institute's Chief Medical Officer. For more on the Gary and Mary West foundation, Read the full article here, and read the West Wireless Health Institute's press release here.

Also, don't miss our interview with Gary West this week on mobihealthnews.

Which technology should Continua pick?

This past week Sensium, the Zigbee Alliance, ANT+, Bluetooth Low Energy, BodyLAN (used in Nike+) and Z-Wave each presented their short range wireless technologies to the Continua Health Alliance at a summit in Barcelona, Spain. The technologies are candidates for the radio technologies selections that the Alliance is making for its Version 2 guidelines. Continua is looking to add guidelines for body worn health and fitness devices (LP-PAN) as well as guidelines for sensors that might be distributed throughout a home to assist remote monitoring (LP-LAN). The LP-LAN guidelines would include bed pressure sensors, motion detection sensors and so on. For more on the version 2 guidelines as well as a quick, high level intro to each of the six technologies that Continua will be evaluating, read on.

Where genomic research meets mHealth

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sponsored a meeting in San Diego this week that aimed to map future funding and research opportunities for personalized health, including preventive, genomic-research based medicine and wireless monitoring applications and services. Stanford professor of bioengineering, genetics and medicine Russ Altman told attendees that services that sequence patients' entire genomes will become available in 10 to 15 years. Altman noted that this influx of raw data increases the opportunity for health IT companies because "anybody who is interested in genomic research also is a huge fan of electronic health care databases." Article