Where next for the Continua Alliance?

Donna Cusano

Paul Williamson, head of wireless medical, in his Wireless Medical blog for Cambridge Consultants (UK) looks back on nearly four years of the Continua Health Alliance.  In 2006, the goal was to have 100% interoperability–that is, any device with a Continua Certified logo would be able to communicate with any other device.  This ambitious goal proved to have many problems in practice, with Continua (wisely, to this editor) scaling back to guidelines that mandate the use of existing standards in combination to achieve end-to-end interoperability.  Going forward, Continua is working to transition current products to Continua standards, stimulate adoption for mobile health and generating extensions to its guidelines to address high volume consumer products–for instance Bluetooth Low Energy and ZigBee to address in-home networks for independent living.  Cambridge Consultants.