Imagine you're a physician and have a patient which has a heart condition. The individual is presently at a friend’s residence and is having issues. Your Android cell phone notifies you of the potential issue. You open up the alert and are capable of seeing in real-time your patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels and other vital statistics that will help you determine next steps. You decide that your patient is in distress and call for an ambulance using the touch of a button and call up your patient. Your patient’s location is also known as a result of GPS inside their smartphone.
This scenario is quickly becoming a reality with a recent advancement in technology: Bluetooth Health Data Profile (HDP). Bluetooth HDP is a new layer overlaid on the Bluetooth protocol stack that describes a standard set of instructions for health-related devices. The Bluetooth HDP hardware would safely connect and transmit data to a smartphone or other receivers. The information could then be transmitted to a primary health management software application utilised by the doctors, nurses, homecare providers, etc.
The truth is you can find hundreds and hundreds of medical products which are currently Bluetooth enabled. Nonetheless, until recently there's not been a standard set of instructions to exchange data. This means that each device must have a unique proprietary application to communicate with. Bluetooth HDP devices will be able to communicate with applications designed to support the new standard. One significant advantage to consumers is the opportunity to buy a heart monitor from one vendor and a blood oxygen meter from yet another. Each of these devices may now communicate with your health care providers chosen health management system. This is great for the customer since it gives us choice and is not going to lock us into a single vendor’s solution. We can also pick the best of breed hardware and software in addition to purchase at competitive prices.
Why do we need a standard set of instructions? What if the web failed to use a standardized set of protocols and technology to present webpages? This would mean you would require a particular browser to view a website built with technology X and another for one built with technology Y. One web browser, like Firefox, may or may not operate with that one website. Because of standards we are able to use just one browser to surf the web.
Medical device companies and health management software developers will be the largest users of this modern technology. Simply because we have a growing aging citizenry, healthcare companies need to figure out better methods to provide high-quality care to their clients and scale with the increasing number of cases. Nevertheless, there are others that can also make use of this technology. For example, cardio exercise equipment manufactures could possibly use Bluetooth HDP to acquire data from a heart monitor worn by the consumer and transmit it to the treadmill they are running on. The speed of the cardio equipment could be accelerated or diminished based on data received from the heart monitor and according to the routine type. The heart monitor can be used on any cardio equipment at any other gym as long as it is a Bluetooth HDP enabled piece of equipment.
Some Devices Currently Supporting Bluetooth HDP
- HUAWEI MediaPad
- uzHealth HDP Weighing Scale
- Nonin oximeter
- Android 4.0 Devices, and many others...
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