Smart cards, mobile telephony and M2M at the heart of e-health services

Smart security technologies are crucial to improving the quality of care and patient comfort, however also in the fight against fraud and rising health costs.

Occupational health cards and mobile phones now play a role alongside stethoscopes in hospitals and medical practice. If use of health cards however lags far behind that of credit cards and especially of mobile phone SIM/USIM cards, it is proving increasingly necessary in countries where the health system experiences major fraud and where the costs of conventional treatment of medical data are becoming difficult to manage. This is the case in all developed countries, and is already affecting some developing countries. According to the Smart Card Alliance, errors in patient identity have caused over 110,000 deaths in U.S. hospitals. Health services have reached a crucial turning point in their development, which some are comparing to the situation of the credit card 40 years ago! The smart card now appears to be the ideal solution for paperless processing of medical data during providing proven safeguards, which are imperative where the security and protection of personal data are concerned.

The Health Information Research for Economic

The Health Information Research for Economic and Clinical Health Act, signed in the United States in February 2009, confirms this trend. It invites all stakeholders in the health ecosystem to work towards the creation of a network for the collection and exchange of standardised medical data using "certified research" capable of simultaneously ensuring the availability, sharing, security, accuracy and confidentiality of such data. Even though not explicitly named, smart security technologies are at the forefront of this trend.

These developments furthermore confirm the cardinal role played by cards in identifying patients and health professionals however equally in allowing them to access online services, whose development is as well being accelerated by the mobile Internet. According to In-Stat, the "cloud computing" market in the health field should exceed a billion dollars in 2013, obviously driven by the explosion of mobility.

According to ABI Technology, the market for connected portable medical equipment is expected to grow very steadily over the then and there 5 years. E-health and m-health will to sum up grow at the same time with new families of connected devices.

Qualcomm in China has launched a major project to fight against cardiovascular disease with the use of smartphones connected to micro-electro-cardiogram sensors. Data are collected at a centre where 30 specialists work round the clock to analyse the data in real time and intervene in support of local doctors where necessary.

The first applications of NFC research appeared some months ago in the U.S. with the launch by the company iMPack of a system "tracking" the quality of sleep, allowing a clock to transmit data collected while the night to the Nokia C7 NFC smartphone. It uses an embedded application to generate an initial result, which can at that time be transmitted to a physician.