Earlier this month the MobiHealthNews team was on-site at the TEDMED conference in San Diego and the Foundation for the NIH's mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C. where we met with a number of wireless health lumiaries, including Contagion Health's Jen McCabe; Frontline SMS:Medic's Josh Nesbit; West Wireless Health Institute's Gary West, Mehran Mehregany and Dr. Eric Topol; and Qualcomm's Don Jones. We asked each of these wireless health experts a few questions about the events or current trends in the industry.
While at TEDMED, MobiHealthNews also captured a quick demo of Philips Electronics' recently launched activity monitor, DeviceLink.
Continue on for a slideshow of the video interviews and demo from TEDMED and mHS09 earlier this month.
Jen McCabe, Founder, Contagion Health
Key quote from McCabe: "I don't think we will see any real systemic benefit from mHealth until we have more Web integration."
Another key quote from McCabe: "I can't get my [health] data in the real world. I can't access it [on my mobile] either. I can enter what I want, but I can't send that to my doctor in a meaningful way. I can't get it back from them in a way that means anything to me personally. Even worse, there's usually a penalty for getting my data in the real world." (More on Regina Holliday's story, which McCabe referenced during the interview.)
Dr. Eric Topol, Chief Medical Officer, West Wireless Health Institute
Key quote from Topol: "This is taking it to a whole new level: Up until now [wireless health has] really been about physiologic things like blood pressure, respiratory rate and fluid status. It didn't include the images and the ultrasound, which is our most important and sensitive overall type of imaging."
Don Jones, VP Health & Life Sciences, Qualcomm
Key quote from Jones: "Then we are going to see a very large drive in the hospital market: Consider there is 110 million ER admissions every year in the US and 40 to 44 million hospital admissions. If you imagine that a very large percentage of them will have wireless sensors on them to get their vital signs then a lot of people will have experience using wireless sensors" in the next five years.
Gary West, Chairman & Co-Founder, West Wireless Health Institute
Key quote from West: "In the next ten years we hope to be the primary force for leading the charge for developing wireless medical devices and solutions to drive down healthcare costs... wireless health is only going to be the first thing this Institute does -- 50 years from now it will not even be called "wireless health." Ten years from now the period we will be moving into is wireless health meets genomics."
Josh Nesbit, Executive Director and Co-Founder, SMS:Medic
Key quote from Nesbit: "We are really excited to be working with [a] group at UCLA. They figured out how to hack a $10 camera phone, slide a blood sample in, shine an LED light, take that MMS and transmit it. What would sit within our software platform is an API that would compare that image to a cell library and compare that image."
Mehran Mehregany, EVP of Engineering & Chief of Engineering Research, West Wireless Health Institute
Key quote from Mehregrany: "What's really impressive to me [at the mHealth Summit] is how the community has innovated around the limited capabilities of regular [mobile] phones -- not even smartphones -- and put that into use in developing countries for a variety of health applications. That helps me extrapolate, once you provide the sensors ... it opens up a whole set of capabilities that don't exist at this time -- basically, medicine at a distance."
Lukas Kreutzer, Direct Life, Philips Electronics
Key quote from Kreutzer: "[At DirectLife] we have developed an accelerometer and put it into a water proof casing that you wear at the core of your body... you could dive with it... it has an accelerometer that measures movement and can store data for up to six months."
