Frank Wartena

Continua: The Impact of a Personal Telehealth Ecosystem

The Continua Health Alliance is nearing the first release of its Design Guidelines, an important milestone towards the establishment of a personal telehealth ecosystem. These guidelines address the technical barrier for a personal telehealth ecosystem: interoperability amongst multivendor systems. This paper describes why it is essential to address interoperability, regulatory aspects of multi-vendor systems and reimbursement for establishment of a personal telehealth ecosystem. In addition we elaborate on the impact that Continua has on the development of the personal telehealth domain. First we motivate why the establishment of such an ecosystem is an essential part in addressing the healthcare challenges in society.

Continua: The reference architecture of a personal telehealth ecosystem

The Continua Health Alliance, which was started in 2006 to enable an interoperable personal telehealth ecosystem, has become a major force in the personal telehealth domain. Within one year after the release of the Version One Design Guidelines over a dozen interoperable products have been officially Continua Certified and many more are coming. In parallel Continua continued its technical developments and has since made great progress on defining interoperability for the LAN and WAN interfaces, and with that now enables end-to-end interoperability. In this paper we motivate why the establishment of such an ecosystem is an essential part in addressing the healthcare challenges in society and why it is essential to address interoperability. The paper introduces the Continua Health Alliance and describes in detail the Continua end-to-end architecture and guidelines, including its security aspects.

Towards Plug-and-Play Interoperability for Wireless Personal Telehealth Systems

This survey paper serves as an introduction to the challenges and needs related to wireless personal telehealth systems and provides an overview of ongoing activities in industry and various communication standards, aiming to enable plug-and-play interoperability. Specifically, we address a recently founded industry consortium, the Continua Health Alliance, and ongoing standardization efforts within the family of ISO 11073/IEEE 1073 standards, the Bluetooth SIG, and the ZigBee Alliance.