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Thursday, 7 February 2013

What is Bluetooth HDP?

By Arthur Madrick


Suppose you are a medical doctor and have a patient which has a heart condition. The individual is at present at a friend's residence and is experiencing issues. Your Android phone notifies you of the potential trouble. You open the alert and are able to see in real-time your patient's heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels along with other vital statistics which may help you determine next steps. You determine that your patient is in distress and send for an ambulance with the touch of a button and call your patient. Your patient's location is also known due to the GPS within their smartphone.

This scenario is quickly becoming a reality with a recent development in technology: Bluetooth Health Data Profile (HDP). Bluetooth HDP is a new layer on top of the Bluetooth protocol stack that describes a standard set of instructions for medical related devices. The Bluetooth HDP hardware would safely and securely connect and send out data to a smartphone or other receivers. The information might then be transmitted to a central health management software program utilised by the physicians, nurses, homecare providers, etc.

The truth is there are actually hundreds and hundreds of medical gadgets which are currently Bluetooth enabled. Nonetheless, until now there has not been a standard set of instructions to exchange data. This is the reason why each device will need to have its own proprietary application to communicate with. Bluetooth HDP devices will be able to interact with applications created to support the new standard. One enormous advantage to consumers is the flexibility to get a heart monitor from one vendor and a blood oxygen meter from yet another. Both of these devices can now communicate with your medical service providers chosen health management system. This is beneficial for the consumer simply because it gives us choice and won't lock us into a single vendor's system. We can also select the best of breed hardware and software in addition to purchase at competitive prices.

Why do we need a standard ? What if the web did not use a standardized set of protocols and technology to display webpages? This would mean you would need a particular browser to view each website. One web browser, like Firefox, may or may not function with that one website. Because of these standards we're able to use 1 browser to surf the web.

Medical device manufacturers and health management software developers will be the largest consumers of this modern technology. Considering that we have a growing aging society, healthcare providers need to identify better approaches to provide high-quality care to their consumers and scale with the growing number of cases. But nevertheless, there are many others that can also take advantage of this technology. As an example, aerobic equipment producers could possibly use Bluetooth HDP to collect data from a heart monitor worn by the end user and pass it to the home treadmill they are running on. The speed of the cardio equipment could be increased or diminished based on data received from the heart monitor and in accordance with to the training 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.




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