The mobile as a health monitoring device

The 3GSM conference really opened up my eyes as to the various ways in which entrepreneurs are thinking of ways to use the mobile phone as a converged device. My initial brush with the mobile technology started with the Palm introduced to me by my good friend Ashish Gupta, Founder of the Indian Palm Users Group. Later, I worked at Picopeta and at the Simputer lab at the IISc where a lot of people were thinking about converged products for the rural market which leveraged the Simple Multilingual People’s Computer - the Simputer (more on this in other posts).

In the developed world however we have seen convergence only recently making a huge impact on the design of mobile phones. The camera, web-tablet, PIM, messaging device and navigation have all converged into one small device.

However, a mobile phone as a medical monitoring device seemed odd to me at first. But here’s why it makes sense especially in Europe and in some parts of Asia:

• Population Aging is primarily a factor of low birth rates rather than longer life spans and in this regard Europe followed by Japan and Russia in Asia are most seriously effected. This means that a growing number of the baby-boomers in these areas of the world who have been exposed to mobile phone usage will be more clued in to their health. A converged device just makes sense for these users.

Folks at the University of Leeds and the Moscow State University - Dr. Oleg Medvedev and Dr. Alison Marshall who were at the 3GSM conference had a fascinating application that showed the possibilities of this type of convergence in the future. Here’s a picture of their bluetooth heart rate monitor that works with Windows Mobile Smartphone devices. Easy setup, easy configuration and a dashboard type setup on the PC that allows a user to view historically or over a period their heart rate, blood pressure and temperature provides a good basic assessment that can be sent to a physician or just used to monitor a number of ailments (blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes etc.).

Pictured above: a live pulse reading at the 3GSM.

A better picture of the application working here>>>

Here’s a link to their work which provides a lot more information about the concept and the partners involved in taking this idea mainstream.

What are your thoughts on this kind of convergence? Please feel free to comment.

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