Qualcomm Exec: In Health, We're 'Driving Without A Dashboard'

Despite the boom in connected health devices and the ‘quantified self’ movement, Qualcomm exec Clint McCellan says people won’t get a fuller picture of the health until interoperable systems make it possible to correlate siloed streams of biometric data.

So-called “quantified self” enthusiasts are using all kinds of gadgets and smartphone apps to log as much data as they can about their activity, sleep, heart rate and more. But, for the most part, that data (like most data in healthcare, unfortunately) exists in siloed, linear sets. But, at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco Thursday, Clint McCellan, senior director of market development for Qualcomm and president and chairman of the non-profit Continua Health Alliance, said the real value emerges when all that data can be pieced together and correlated.

Referencing Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley’s talk earlier today, McCellan told GigaOM Pro analyst Jodi Ranck, “What he was saying about maps is, I think, the same about health. When you open up a map and it’s just one-dimensional… great. What he wants to know is [how do you] make it multi-dimensional.”

Interoperability between medical devices and applications has long been an obstacle for connected health. Continua Health Alliance, which includes 240 member companies worldwide, for example, was founded to create a system of healthcare products that can share information. But using Qualcomm’s 2net Platform launched in December, as well as its software developer kit released launched last month, McCellan said, companies are starting to be able to achieve the kind of interoperability that will give patients and doctors richer pictures of a person’s health...