How ITU is set to create network on personal medical devices

As a result of this standard, global IT and communication companies such as Cisco, IBM, Samsung, Oracle, Intel, Qualcomm etc can now create and design better device level solutions and target the medical segment more fervently than ever before.

Fuelled by a need to increase the healthcare networking boundaries, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has signed off a new standard for communication between personal medical devices.

Global IT majors such as Intel, Cisco, Samsung, IBM, Oracle, etc are behind the new standard, as they are all members of the Continua Health Alliance.

Conceptualized and developed with an aim to create a better managed medical network ecosystem, the ITU's “ITU-T H.810” standard “contains” the Alliance's “Interoperability design guidelines for personal health systems”.

This set of guidelines is conceptualized in order to allow easy interoperability of different networking technologies and devices between all manner of personal health devices such as wireless blood pressure cuffs, weight scales and a wide range of body activity trackers.

And with the availability of this level of medical device networking standard, it will be possible for medical gadgets to have a common thread of standard code embedded in them. With the help of this, it will become for devices to interoperate, creating better output interfaces for the doctors.

This ITU standard offers five interfaces:

•TAN-IF: Interface between touch area network (TAN) health devices and application hosting devices (AHDs)

•PAN-IF: Interface between personal area network (PAN) health devices and AHDs

•LAN-IF: Interface between local area network (LAN) health devices and AHDs

•WAN-IF: Interface between AHDs and wide area network (WAN) health devices

•HRN-IF: Interface between WAN health devices and Health Record Network health devices

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