As the third annual mHealth Summit convenes today near Washington, D.C., San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) says it has formed a new subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, from its wireless health business unit. The wireless technology giant says it also has established a $100 million wireless health investment fund that will be managed by Qualcomm Ventures.
Qualcomm Life is headed by Rick Valencia, a former CEO at San Diego-based ProfitLine who joined Qualcomm a little over a year ago. Valencia previously helped to launch ProfitLine’s multi-billion dollar telecommunications management services business. Qualcomm’s wireless health guru, Don Jones, continues in a similar role at Qualcomm Life as vice president of global strategy and market development.
As part of today’s announcement, Qualcomm also unveiled the 2net Platform and Hub, and a video explaining the technology is available here.
The 2net Hub is a product that plugs into a standard electric outlet—it resembles a simple wireless router—and serves as a gateway to the 2net Platform, which operates as a technology-agnostic, cloud-based service. The platform serves as a kind of universal translator and intermediary that addresses one of the intractable challenges amid the convergence of different wireless health devices, technologies, standards, and systems. Data from the 2net Hub, a user’s mobile phone, or other gateways, is sent to the 2net Platform, where it is encrypted and made available in the cloud to patients, physicians, and other appropriate users. Qualcomm says the system meets medical privacy requirements and works with multiple carriers.
Qualcomm says its 2net Platform and Hub, which are on display at the three-day conference in National Harbor, MD, and will transfer, store, convert, and display a variety of medical device data. More than 40 customers and collaborators are either considering or already integrating with its 2net ecosystem, including Pittsburgh, PA-based BodyMedia, New York’s Hello Health, and San Diego-based ResMed.
In today’s statement, Valencia says, “Qualcomm Life was founded, in part, to assist medical device manufacturers who approached Qualcomm for help when their own wireless connectivity attempts became untenable due to technology selection errors, unscalable deployment models and prohibitively high operational support costs.”
Qualcomm’s 2net Hub device resembles a simple wireless router. Qualcomm says it “seamlessly connects to integrated partner medical devices via shortwave radio, uploading biometric data over the cellular network to the 2net Platform’s data center.”
The company describes its platform and hub as the core for a technology “ecosystem.” Qualcomm also says the devices are individually listed with the FDA as Medical Device Data Systems (MDDS).
