Mobile chip maker Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) announced plans to form a new business called Qualcomm Life, a division that will manage the development of the company's mobile health platforms.

The division, formerly known as Qualcomm Wireless Health, will focus on remote wireless monitoring in the healthcare industry.

The idea is to help medical-device manufacturers avoid the large technical effort of developing their own connected devices.

"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," noted Rick Valencia, vice president and general manager of Qualcomm Life, in a release.

Qualcomm also announced a cloud-based platform called 2net that is designed to transmit biometric data from patients to physicians and other caregivers. Additionally, the platform will enable doctors and patients to transfer, store, convert and display data generated by different medical devices.

"Our services, including integration on the 2net platform, remove the burden for medical-device manufacturers of a large technical development effort, providing integration with mobile carriers and solving the operational complexities of supporting wireless medical device data in the field," Valencia said.

Users can access the 2net platform via the 2net hub, which works with 2G; 3G; Bluetooth; Bluetooth Low Energy; Wi-Fi; and ANT+, a local-area radio protocol. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has listed 2net as an approved Medical Device Data System (MDDS) that supports regulatory requirements such as the ISO 13485 quality-management standard.

For more:
- see this eWeek article

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