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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Cambridge Consultants touts innovation, launches e-health device
By Rodney H. Brown
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Technology product design and development firm Cambridge Consultants rolled out a new connected health product called VenaHub, a health data collection system built as an inexpensive Bluetooth-enabled USB dongle that integrates data into a customizable health information web portal.
Cambridge Consultants, which has its headquarters in Cambridge, England, and its U.S. offices in Cambridge, Mass., showed off the VenaHub on Tuesday at its own event, Innovation Day 2009, which featured big name speakers and demos of other technology the firm developed, including an advanced clothes iron.
At Le Meridien hotel, Cambridge Consultants brought together speakers such as Lita Nelsen, director of the technology licensing office at MIT, who spoke to the crowd of venture capitalists and tech executives about the current state and possible future of tech transfer both locally and around the world.
The VenaHub device, which gets its official launch this morning at the 6th annual Connected Health Symposium, presented by the Center for Connected Health, a division of Partners HealthCare, can store data from any number of Bluetooth-connected devices even if the computer it is attached to isn’t on, then upload that data automatically once the portal website has been brought up in a browser.
The data can then be made available to any number of e-health information systems, such as Google Health, for viewing by a patient’s doctor, according to Vaishali Kamat, group manager for medical technology at Cambridge Consultants.
One of the goals in developing the device, Kamat said, was to show that it could be made very affordable. Even with the new technology for connecting to online e-health systems and the ability to store data offline, the device would be priced “in the tens of dollars as opposed to the hundreds of dollars,” Kamat said.
Some of the devices Cambridge Consultants has already developed that would connect to the VenaHub are an inhaler prototype launched this spring, and weight-scales and blood pressure monitors it developed for A&D Medical, announced in August. Because it is based on the developing standards from the Continua Health Alliance, any device that adheres to those standards will work with the VenaHub, Kamat said.
According to Pam McNamara, president of Cambridge Consultants, the goal of the Innovation Day event was to connect more strongly with the local technology community.
“We want to build our visibility and have more recognition in the community,” McNamara said. The firm this year celebrated its fifth year in the Kendall Square area and is building off a record 2008 and a 2009 that saw positive growth still, despite the down economy.
Also speaking at the event was Bob Metcalfe of Polaris Venture Partners, who talked about how the developing clean energy sector could learn from the history of the growth of the Internet. Among the points Metcalfe made on clean energy was the idea that corn-based ethanol was not effective because of the way it impacts food prices.
“I can’t find anyone who still thinks corn-based ethanol is a good idea,” Metcalfe said. “But I haven’t been to Iowa.”
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