IBM, Continua to showcase wireless interoperability at CES

The annual International Consumer Electronics Show opens Thursday in Las Vegas. Normally we wouldn't care all that much, given the consumer focus, but this time, the huge show features a first-ever Digital Health Summit. We'd be there, but the organizers didn't publish an agenda for the health portion until it was too late to find an airfare that wasn't prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, we're already getting a decent preview from some of the vendors.

IBM and Vignet, a Virginia-based seller of connected health products, both will demonstrate a home-based pulse oximeter that connects to the Internet to notify health professionals when a patient's blood oxygen level is low, according to a PC World report.

Both firms, as members of the Continua Health Alliance, also will take part in a larger demonstration of end-to-end connectivity based on Continua's standards-based architecture. The plan sounds similar to the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise demo at the annual HIMSS conference.

For this demonstration, a Nonin Medical wireless pulse oximeter will send data via Bluetooth to a computer running the Vignet Connected Health Services platform. The PC will then upload the data to an IBM server, following a draft Continua WAN interface standard. The server should be able to share the data securely with healthcare providers, disease management companies, electronic health records and personal health records.

To learn more about the Digital Health Summit at CES:
- read this PC World story about IBM's monitoring systems
- check out this press release from Continua Health Alliance

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