Wireless Health: Personalized Medicine Comes to the Device Industry

The wireless revolution in health care won't just add another gadget to the toolbox of medical product manufacturers. Wireless health is a trend that sees the consumerization, systematization, globalization, and the economies of scale made possible by information technology disrupting the practice of medicine and medical markets. What began, six years or so ago in the hands of medical device companies like Royal Philips Electronics NV, and Medtronic PLC, and BioTelemetry Inc. as "remote monitoring," a way for companies to reach patients with chronic diseases in their homes, is rapidly snowballing into a new paradigm for improving care, increasing access to care, and making care affordable. This new wave in medicine is being driven by outsiders—by wireless providers like Qualcomm, the cell phone manufacturers Nokia and Apple Computer, MicroSoft and other software companies, and manufacturers of internet networking equipment like Cisco--that are simply leveraging their enormous installed bases to get into new high-growth markets in health care. According to Andrew Thompson, CEO of "intelligent medicine" company Proteus Digital Health Inc., by 2010, four billion people in the world will own cell phones, 50% of them by people that make less than $10 a day. That's an enormous infrastructure for reaching individuals in their homes, and therefore, for targeting chronic diseases.

Proteus Biomedical describes the potential of the field this way, in a company presentation: "What if my cell phone alerted me when my father needed help with his Parkinson's? What...