There’s Less Pie in the Sky as Wireless Health Gets Connected

30 percent, from $970 million in 2011 to $1.4 billion in 2012.

Of the $1.4 billion invested in 2012, Qualcomm Life has been the most active investor, according to Don Jones, a Qualcomm Life executive who co-founded the WLSA and now serves as chairman. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) has not disclosed exactly how much it has invested in digital health startups, but Jones also noted that Walgreens and Aetna have each embarked on multi-million dollar efforts to develop software for health-related applications.

The increase also has been evident at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jones said. “CES went from no [digital health] exhibitors three years ago to over 300 exhibitors in a dedicated pavilion this year.”

“Another big trend of the last 12 months is that big pharmacy is here, and they’re building real products,” Jones said. While Johnson & Johnson has been involved since the early years of the WLSA, Sanofi, Roche, and Lilly have begun to commit substantial resources to R&D in connected health over the past year. “If they were here before, they were just kicking the tires,” Jones said.

Another trend emerging in recent years is in basic research, where dedicated R&D centers have been proliferating. In addition to UCLA, the University of Southern California, UC San Diego, and San Diego’s West Health Institute, Jones said UC San Francisco, Harvard University, Cornell University, and Georgia Institute of Technology have all established R&D centers focused on connected health in recent years.

The phase change became especially clear during a series of presentations yesterday afternoon in a session billed as “Business Models Built to Last—Perspectives from Early Stage Successes.” In each case, the technology innovation addressed real problems and the CEOs outlined sound and practical business strategies:

—FitLinxx, founded in 1993 and based in Shelton, CT, has expanded from its core expertise in developing computerized exercise tracking systems to providing wellness programs that include wireless activity monitors and Web applications. The Pebble, designed for

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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.