Just imagine you're a medical doctor and have a patient with a heart condition. The individual is presently at a friend's house and is having issues. Your Android mobile phone notifies you of the potential issue. You open up the alert and are capable of seeing in real-time your patient's heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels along with vital statistics that may assist you determine next steps. You decide that your patient is in distress and call for an ambulance with the touch of a button and call your patient. Your patient's location can also be known due to the GPS within their smartphone.

This scenario is quickly becoming a reality with a recent advancement in technology: Bluetooth Health Data Profile (HDP). Bluetooth HDP is a new layer overlaid on the Bluetooth protocol stack that specifies a standard set of instructions for medical related devices. The Bluetooth HDP piece of equipment would safely connect and send out data to a smartphone or other receivers. The info will then be transmitted to a central health management software application utilised by the doctors, nursing staff, homecare providers, etc.

The truth is one can find hundreds and hundreds of medical gadgets that are currently Bluetooth enabled. Nevertheless, until now there's not been a standard set of instructions to exchange data. This means that each device must have a unique proprietary application to interact with. Bluetooth HDP devices will be able to interact with applications developed to support the new standard. One huge advantage to consumers is the flexibility to purchase a heart monitor from one vendor and a blood oxygen meter from another. Each of these devices are able to communicate with your health care providers selected health management system. This is very good for the customer simply because it gives us choice and won't lock us into a single vendor's system. We are also able to choose the best of breed hardware and software as well as purchase at competitive prices.

Why do we need a standard set of instructions? What if the web did not use a standard set of protocols and technology to present webpages? This would mean you would need a specific browser to view a website built with technology X and another for one built with technology Y. One web browser, like Firefox, may or may not operate with that one website. Because of standards we're able to use one browser to surf the web.

Medical device suppliers and health management software designers will be the largest users of this technology. Given that we have a growing aging citizenry, healthcare providers need to think about better methods to provide quality care to their clients and scale with the ever-increasing number of cases. Nevertheless, there are others that can also make use of this technology. For instance, aerobic exercise equipment producers might use Bluetooth HDP to acquire data from a heart monitor worn by the end user and convey it to the treadmill they are running on. The speed of the cardio equipment could be accelerated or diminished depending on data received from the heart monitor and according to the routine type. The heart monitor may also be used on any cardio equipment at any other gym as long as it is a Bluetooth HDP enabled piece of equipment.