Continua Health Alliance will make its design guidelines available for download free of charge, with an eye toward helping developers build end-to-end systems that offer connectivity between personal health products.
Continua is an international not-for-profit organization of healthcare and technology companies, committed to creating a system of interoperable personal connected health products and services.
Officials say public access to the Continua Design Guidelines will help a larger number of developers build end-to-end systems that provide seamless connectivity between personal health products and services, facilitating interoperability among devices and apps, driving down data collection and management costs and significantly streamlining and simplifying the development process for technology companies.
“Allowing a large audience to access Continua Guidelines will be healthy for the industry” said Clint McClellan, senior director of strategic marketing at Qualcomm Life, who serves as Continua's board president. “This is a vital step in enabling a collaborative system of interoperable plug-and-play healthcare technologies, that will ultimately decrease time-to-market and drive down deployment and maintenance costs – core components of Continua’s mission.”
Continua recently made its 2011 Design Guidelines available to university students as part of its commitment to support the 2011-2012 GSMA Mobile Health University Challenge. Having access to Continua’s Guidelines has given University Challenge participants the opportunity to accelerate their application development by rapidly integrating a wide variety of Continua compliant health and medical devices, officials say.
This public availability will follow an internal eight-month interoperability/pilot phase that will collect and issue errata prior to the availability. Continua will make the 2011 Guidelines available as a free download in April of this year.
The Alliance points out that the past year has seen an increase in Continua Certified products, including Android 4.0, which was released with the Bluetooth Health Device Profile, which supports Continua Certified devices such as heart-rate monitors, glucose meters, blood pressure cuffs, thermometers and scales. This is the first time that applications can be loaded into an unmodified Mobile OS with the levels of security needed for healthcare data transactions.
In addition, Continua notes, demand for Continua Certified products increased with the Japanese Tsunami disaster relief efforts and the recent launch of Continua-compliant personal connected healthcare technologies and regional partnership solutions in Japan. There were commercial releases of Continua-based consumer solutions and government-backed use of the Continua technology in two programs in 2011.
Continua also began collaborating with NFC Forum to expand connectivity, simplify data exchange in healthcare IT, and launched the Continua-India work group, which focuses on adoption and promotion of Continua within India
“We are extremely happy that the Bluetooth Health Device Profile is included in Android 4.0,” said McClellan, “this will make it much easier for third parties to develop health applications that can use a wide variety of Continua certified devices. We are also seeing increasing international adoption of Continua as the Japanese government has mandated that relief efforts should use Continua-based systems to ensure rapid and effective clinic deployments. And, because of increasing interest in India, we have formed a dedicated India work group to facilitate adoption of Continua based systems. ”
