Connected Health: Mobile's impact on connectivity

BOSTON—As the company that makes most of the chips that go into mobile devices, Qualcomm Technologies has a unique perspective on how the mobile evolution will impact connected health.

Speaking at Partners HealthCare’s 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium, Peggy Johnson, Qualcomm’s president of global market development, said the mobile platform has surpassed every other platform.

Mobile revenue globally is about $1.5 trillion, or 1.2 percent of the GDP of the world. And, this year 23 percent of all patients will be in the mobile space. “That’s an astounding number,” Johnson said.

About 7 billion cumulative smartphone unit sales are forecast between 2013 and 2017. Meanwhile, studies have shown a 45 percent reduction in mortality rate for chronic disease patients using telehealth, 14 percent reduction in days in bed and 24 percent reduction in emergency department admissions. “These are exciting numbers,” she said. “We know telehealth can be a huge boost to the delivery of healthcare.” About 90 percent of the world’s population has access to a mobile network and more people have a mobile phone than a toothbrush.

The vast majority (89 percent) of physicians would recommend a health app to their patients, she said.

However, there is a limited amount of spectrum. In 2010, the amount of data flowing on mobile networks doubled, Johnson said. That’s just in one year. Now, the industry is preparing for a 1,000-fold increase in data traffic, a lot of which is driven by video. About two-thirds of all data will be video in two years, she said.

While we can continue to optimize airwaves, a big solution will be moving big macro cell sites closer to the user, Johnson said. That will allow users to utilize their own infrastructure and plug in a very small cell, access the airwaves between them and the small cells, allowing the airwaves in between to be used by others. “This is a great solution because we don’t want to stop this telehealth revolution.”

Johnson referred to “the internet of everything.” By 2020, there will be 25 billion connected devices in the world but only half of them will be handsets. The other half will be connectivity from various things in our environment, such as room sensors.

The future holds a digital sixth sense, Johnson said. “The digital and physical worlds are starting to merge and will present data that will be more relevant to the context.” For example, when walking through a shopping mall, a person’s phone could link his or her likes and dislikes to various stores and their promotional campaigns. Phones can accept and filter those signals down to the most relevant to each individual.

“As the computer in our pocket gets more powerful we can take advantage of that in the healthcare space,” she said. “It’s so exciting because we can possibly give people a heads up on a variety of things happening in their body.”