Medica claims to be the world’s largest medical show. It’s a very monochrome event – all of the equipment is white and shiny, and most of the exhibitors and visitors are soberly dressed in dark suits, as befits the serious profession of medicine and spending money in Dusseldorf. Looking at the equipment on display and the crowds thronging the show, you certainly wouldn’t get any impression that there’s a recession around, other than slightly more suits than normal and rather fewer bow-ties around the necks of the visiting consultants.
As far as the medical industry is concerned, it’s business as usual, and hopefully more so, as more of us get older and less healthy. But there are some interesting trends. One of which is the increased prevalence of wireless connectivity. In previous years equipment manufacturers were happy for nurses to jot down the readings from their instruments. A few devices had wireless links, but they were the exception. This year, particularly at the consumer end of the market, wireless was becoming the norm, at least at the top end of product ranges.
Almost all of that was Bluetooth. I stopped counting after the first hundred devices, and that was in just two of the twenty halls. ANT was in evidence, helped with a demonstration of a prototype X10 Nano phone from Sony Ericsson, which was using the ANT protocol to connect to a weighing scale, heart rate belt and pedometer. Wi-Fi was there in a few products, but mostly confined to tags for asset management, and I failed to find a single ZigBee medical device. There also seemed to be very little profile for the Continua Alliance in terms of products or signage. Even The Intel stand was conspicuously Continua-free.