Not just for your phone: Bluetooth in health monitoring

Technology and health care go hand in hand. Technological advances are vastly improving the way we diagnose and treat illness and disease. As these advancements occur, the demand for newer and better technology grows as well.

In particular, the field of health monitoring has been expanding. As knowledge about disease has grown, so has the need to monitor specific physiological markers of disease. Additionally, the aging population will also require more health monitoring. As demand for health monitoring has grown so has the need to better technology. Ideal health monitoring systems need to be small, portable devices with low power consumption that are easy to use and inexpensive. Bluetooth increasingly appears to fit these requirements and could greatly improve remote monitoring of health.

The term Bluetooth pulls to mind handless cellphone conversations and portable stereos. But, Bluetooth technology provides an open wireless option to exchange data over short distances, for any purpose.

The application of Bluetooth to health monitoring has been rapidly expanding. Currently, over 40 million Bluetooth health care devices exist for home and professional monitoring. These numbers are expected to rise to over one billion in 2013.

Recently, researchers at the LMN Institute of Infotech and at the Indian Institute of Technology showed that fetal phonocardiography could be adapted for use with Bluetooth. Fetal phonocardiography is the modern equivalent of the stethoscope in fetal heart monitoring. This technique is non-invasive and does not send out ultrasound or other energy. The adaptation of this technology with Bluetooth provides numerous advantages for home monitoring including the ability to collect data for analysis on home computers without a lot of intervention or cables. Accuracy tests comparing these results with ultrasound-based Doppler shifts showed 98 percent accuracy.

Other researchers have also applied Bluetooth to health monitoring. Researchers at Manukau Institute of Technology created an app that uses Bluetooth to connect units measuring a variety of physiological measures including body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and movement to mobile devices. This could be used for personal health monitoring or could be a way to send patient information to remote locations.

The Bluetooth medical device industry is rapidly expanding and promising new applications of this technology keep arising. As the use of this technology continues to expand, changes to energy consumption are required. Additionally, health monitoring sometimes requires patients to wear devices over a long period of time. This means that the feasibility of Bluetooth rests on low power consumption. Luckily, advances in Bluetooth low energy (BLE) are expected to greatly improve health monitoring potential of Bluetooth through reduction in size and power consumption required. This reduction could improve Bluetooth's ability to monitor changes over long periods of time, as required by health monitoring.