The NFC Forum has published its first specification directed at NFC-enabled personal health care devices, hoping to expand use of NFC technology in the industry segment and reduce the reliance on proprietary implementations.
The forum, a standards and trade group, also has introduced two candidate specifications aimed primarily at consumer electronics applications.
The health device standard, known as the personal health device communication technical specification, defines how data is transmitted between the health-monitoring devices, such as blood pressure monitors or glucose meters, and computing devices, such as smartphones. The health data could then be processed and displayed for the consumer or patient or sent over the network to be processed, where health-care providers could evaluate it.
Market research firm ABI Research recently predicted that by 2016, more than 100 million wearable NFC medical devices would be sold annually.
A number of companies, such as Omron Healthcare and iMPak Health, already offer devices for medical monitoring at home. For instance, iMPak Health’s RhythmTrak is a handheld device which measures patients’ heart rate and rhythms; tapping an NFC-capable smartphone or tablet against the RhythmTrak device enables patients to upload their data and transmit it to a physician.
But other assessments of NFC health device adoption are less optimistic. At a May 2013 MIT Enterprise Forum NFC Cluster discussion panel in Boston, Dr. Kamal Jethwani, leader of the research and program evaluation initiatives at Partners Health’s Center for Connected Health, pointed out that, “a criticism of NFC is that it introduces a step for a person to do,” such as tapping a fitness tracker to a smartphone after a walk to upload the distance to the user’s profile. “My suspicion, even though I haven’t done it with activity, is that that extra step is actually going to lead to about 30% to 40% less engagement,” he said.
Stephen Tiedemann, chairman of the NFC Forum’s healthcare special interest group, told NFC Times that most of the NFC-enabled medical monitoring devices on the market use proprietary specifications, with which the new NFC Forum’s specification will now be in competition. “Hopefully, the standardized way of doing things will win,” Tiedemann said.
The advantage to patients and physicians, according to the NFC Forum, is that adoption of the new specification would enable interoperability among medical devices from different manufacturers.
In January 2013, the NFC Forum announced the formation of five special interest groups, or SIGs, including the health care SIG. The health care special interest group will concentrate on in-home health care devices, which let patients gather their health data, such as blood pressure, blood sugar, or pulse rates at home and then send the data to their health care providers or to track changes themselves.
NFC Forum director Debbie Arnold noted at the time that connecting these devices to a network to send the data has long presented a challenge to the home-health care field. She said that the ability to upload and send the data by tapping the device with an NFC-capable mobile phone would make the devices more intuitive for users.
Continua Health Alliance, an association that works with standards bodies to develop interoperability among personal health devices using a variety of technologies, worked with the NFC Forum on the health specifications. Earlier in 2013, the Continua Health Alliance made certification available for NFC devices, and the organization will adopt new forum specs into its latest guidelines for health care devices.
New Candidate Specifications
Interoperability is also important to consumer electronics. During the NFC Forum’s January 2013 conference announcing the special interest groups, NFC Forum chairman Koichi Tagawa said, “if it only worked between two devices from one company, that’s not really (making the) consumer happy.”
The NFC Forum today also announced it had published two new proposed specifications, which enhance earlier specifications from the forum and which appear to mainly relate to consumer electronics.
One of the new proposed specifications, connection handover 1.3, a successor to the forum’s connection handover 1.2 standard, covers use of NFC to set up Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections between devices. Version 1.3 adds support for mediated handover, in which an NFC-enabled device acts as a sort of go-between to facilitate connection handover between two other NFC-enabled devices. Mediated handover is designed for pairing of devices, which are stationary or too large to tap together normally.
The other candidate spec, the signature RTD 2.0, offers enhancement to security for exchanging data between devices in the forum’s standard NFC format. The version 2.0 standard relates to how the data is verified, and it will update version 1.0, published in 2010, with new recommendations from U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, and German Federal Office of Information Security, BSI.
The NFC Forum publishes candidate specifications three to four months prior to their final adoption as technical specifications. This period allows NFC Forum members, device manufacturers, and other standards bodies to provide feedback on the new specifications.
“If it happens to be the case that there is something that's difficult to implement, then the candidate stage allows us to correct that before the specification gets finally adopted,” Tiedemann told NFC Times. During the candidate stage, he said, “the legal framework for candidate specifications is that manufacturers are free to implement them,” but they do so with the understanding that the NFC Forum may make changes to the specifications prior to their final adoption.