Wireless-Life Sciences Investor Meeting Puts Innovation on Stage—Boston Sleep Company Zeo Claims a Top Prize

As Qualcomm’s vice president of health and life sciences and as chairman of the San Diego-based Wireless Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA), Don Jones is attuned to subtle disturbances in the field of mobile health. He tells me that one of the auspicious signals for the still-emerging industry is that the 200 people who registered for the Wireless-Life Sciences Investor Meeting yesterday in La Jolla nearly doubled last year’s attendance. He also notes that more companies sought to make presentations at the conference, and the quality of those selected also has improved.

“The maturity level of the companies have improved, and the stories have improved,” Jones says. “Their business models also have become more and more rational. In the early years, we had companies with new technologies but no business plans.”

The investor conference marks the first day of a three-day WLSA Convergence Summit that continues through Thursday. In the early years of the WLSA Investor Meeting—circa 2006—the conference consisted of maybe 40 people sitting around a table, says Rob McCray, who became the WLSA’s first president and CEO earlier this year. Although he can’t offer any data just yet, McCray contends that 2010 will mark the first year in the development of a new industry that uses wireless technologies to improve healthcare by lowering costs and enhancing patient treatment, health, and safety.

The WLSA, a non-profit trade group, invited 12 mobile health companies to make presentations about new technologies they are developing in three categories: clinical applications; operational effectiveness; and consumer experience. The group issued an award to one company in each category “to continue to raise awareness of wireless healthcare and of the WLSA,” according to Peter Erickson of TripleTree, the Minneapolis-area investment banking firm that sponsors the awards. The presentations also offer a cross-section of the type of innovations now underway in mobile health. So here is a roundup, with the award winner noted for each category:

Best Clinical Applications

—AirStrip Technologies of San Antonio, TX, is developing technologies that enable doctors to view certain patient vital signs usually available only on

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.