Bluetooth 4.0 will not only be for talking hands free in the future. New standards and new gadgets are springing up to help a person keep track of what their body is doing using this popular wireless standard.
Mobile technology is expanding quickly in the area of personal health. Bluetooth is becoming a lead mechanism in this section of the mobile spectrum. Sending files, tethering and hands free dialing are all great Bluetooth features, but this next step will do much more important things. Bluetooth will be taking your temperature and monitoring your heart rate. These two areas are specifically receiving Bluetooth standards.
The group responsible for this upward transition to Bluetooth health standards is the “Bluetooth Special Interest Group” or “SIG”. They oversee the Bluetooth trademarks and technologies that are distributed to manufacturers. They are not a public, but a private institution begun in September 1998. They have recently approved the “Health Thermometer Profile” and the “Heart Rate Profile”. This is just the beginning of medical devices that monitor and control the body for the sake of better health. SIG does not make Bluetooth devices themselves.
How does it work? Your smartphone is for all practical purposes a small computer. The Bluetooth radio in that small computer can talk to other devices. One device being bantied about is a “thermometer patch” that communicates body temperature to the smartphone using Bluetooth. Another gadget is a “smart watch” that sends a multitude of health and physical data to the smartphone. The data can then be sent over the 3G cell network or a Wi-Fi hotspot, since smartphones have those style connections also. The data is sent on to a doctor or a health trainer. If the monitoring equipment being used is to track workouts, a health trainer can judge the results from their desk hundreds of miles away while their client is exercising.
This is not just for person-to-person contact from a runner or patient to a trainer or doctor. Other medical purposes can be used as well. With each new version of Bluetooth, it has been getting more powerful and faster. Now with the 4.0 version it is also getting “greener”. It uses less power than past versions. This is important in an age where battery technology is not keeping up with hardware technology. The small button and coin cells that will need to be used with these new medical devices do not have much output. It is hoped this 4.0 standard will boost the length of time these batteries will last.
Look for the Bluetooth 4.0 standard to also be showing up in autos, not just wearable medical devices. They will also be showing up in the manufacturing industry. Bluetooth as a tool for controlling industrial machines is already a reality. Remote controls for laptops or PCs are already being shown to be an alternative way to manipulate a computer. All this is done while sipping, not gulping, the battery juice.
