What’s Holding Back the Always Connected Wearable Health Sensors We Need?

Anyone who’s had experienced with bluetooth (I think that’s everyone right?) knows the pains associated with bluetooth.  When it works, it works great.  However, when the device loses its pairing, it’s a mess.  Plus, we all know how much fun it is to get various devices to pair in the first place.  The amazing part is that I’m literally @techguy on Twitter and so you think this wouldn’t be an issue for me and for the most part it’s not.  However, I still don’t like it.  Now think about my mother or another less technical senior trying to figure out how to pair their health sensors using bluetooth to their health hub.  Forgetaboutit!

Unfortunately, bluetooth health sensors have been the best solution to date with a hub that connects to all the sensors being a common implementation.  What’s unfortunate is that we all know how it should really be.  In fact, the technology is available today that would get rid of the mess we know as bluetooth pairing.  If you’ve used one of the original Kindle devices, you’ve experienced it first hand.

The original Kindle device comes built in with a cellular connection.  There’s no need to connect to wifi or bluetooth to another device.  The built in cellular connection just connects and downloads whatever books you want from Amazon.  We could do the same thing with all the various wearable health sensors.  Just have those sensors connect directly to the cellular network and automatically send the data from the device back to a server in the cloud.  Simple as that.  No pairing needed.  Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

What’s the problem?  The technology is all there and available today.  As I tried to understand why this hasn’t happened already, I connected with Sid Kandan, CEO at Stel Life, provider of a Connected Health OS which includes the Stel Vitals Hub.  When I met Sid, I told him that the first person to be able to provide a sub $1 cellular connection on a wearable health sensor would be a big winner.  At that price, why would anyone use bluetooth?  They wouldn’t.

Of course, I’ll admit that I was somewhat naïve to the topic even if I was directionally accurate.  Kandan, then proceeded to educate me on some of the reasons why I believe we’re not likely to see broad cellular connected health sensors in the near future.  As usual, it goes back to the economics of bluetooth versus cellular.  We might see one off devices like the Apple Watch that can hide the modem cost in their expensive device, but that’s not true for most health sensors as you’ll see.

Kandan shared with me that a simple bluetooth device in a wearable health sensor would cost around $1.  Plus, these bluetooth options were available from dozens of vendors and there are thousands of them readily available.  Basically, incorporating bluetooth into your health sensor is at the price point I said that a cell connection needed to be at to get widespread adoption.  At $1, that’s a really basic bluetooth option for sending data.  However, even a more sophisticated bluetooth option you might find in a health hub device, it’s still only $5.

Now, let’s look at the cost of a modem that’s needed to connect to the cellular network.  These run about $30-40 during regular times.  Although, right now things are even worse since there’s a semiconductor shortage and many modem producers are shifting production to 5G phones so the modems aren’t available for IoT devices.  That means a modem that was normally ~$30 is now retailing for $212 for “immediate delivery” (which is a 41 week lead time).

As if this isn’t enough, to add a cell modem to your product, according to Kandan you have to “pay 10x-40x for the wireless component, tune it to the networks, certify it through the FCC, PTCRB, and then carrier specific testing.”  Leave it to regulators to drive up the price of things.  Maybe there’s a good reason why cellular components need to be certified more than bluetooth that I don’t quite understand (possibly protecting the cellular network providers?), but either way this added testing and certification drives the cost of cellular connectivity for health sensors even higher.

I think that would be enough to illustrate the challenge of health sensors connecting directly on a cellular network, but Kandan also offered this insight, “Thanks to recent laws like the IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020. Vitals devices connected straight to the cell network have a higher bar to meet. Not only do they need to demonstrate the requirements in the link above, but they also cannot run foreign national code in the modem or base firmware software.”

No doubt, I’m likely leaving out even more details and nuances here, but the takeaway should be clear.  Without massive changes in pricing for cell modems and improvements in regulations and carrier requirements around incorporating cellular modems into health sensors, we’re unlikely to see that happen any time soon.  There’s just not enough room for most health sensors to incorporate the cost of a cellular connection.

Looking at those prices, there is a possibility we’ll see hubs that connected via cellular and incorporate a wide variety of IoT devices in your home.  In that case, the finances of incorporating a cellular connection into the hub may make sense.  Then, the hub can connect using bluetooth to the various devices.  This certainly still isn’t ideal, but may be a solution for some use cases where the devices are already paired with the hub and the hub can connect via cellular to the cloud.

I’ll admit that I was sad to learn this information.  It seemed clear to me that the future of health sensor data collection and sharing to the cloud was going to be here before we know it.  As I look at these economics, I’m thinking it’s still further away than I’d like.  It’s too bad that the technology is there, but the cost isn’t.

What do you think of this?  Is there something I missed?  Is there something else going on that will change these dynamics?  Let us know in the comments.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Hey John,

    Just go the other way, as some are already doing. Incorporate wearable data sensors into the phones. They already have the cellular connection, and most people carry them or have them nearby nearly 100% of the time.

  • Todd,
    That’s an option and something that will happen to a certain extent. The issue is that innovation in sensors is likely to go well beyond the cell providers who have to incorporate the sensors into the cell phone. Plus, cell phone creators have other interests. So, it will happen to some extent, but not as far as is needed to go.

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