Over the past twenty years in the medical device community and within the healthcare enterprise there has been this debate about proprietary versus standards based wireless offerings. It started out when the Wireless Medical Telemetry Service was introduced in the late 1990's and then 802.11b being approved in 1999. The start of the Wi-Fi revolution as we know it.
The author provided OEM guidance on the first medical telemetry system using 802.11 FHSS around 1999. This was ahead of it' time but followed the logical next steps in the WLAN revolution which kicked off with the Wi-Fi Alliance forming in 2000.
Then came the whole era of smart pumps incorporating 802.11 advances from the early 2000's to another medical telemetry company architecting 802.11 as a part of their enterprise solution.
Just like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth has provided a standards based approach and is enjoyed by a surrounding community of interoperability and product roll-outs in multiple vertical markets. Millions of $ of investment in R&D has driven innovation and security advances.
The introduction of the smart phone incorporating BTLE pretty much has solidified BTLE as the standards based personal area network of choice.
Most recently several medical device companies have incorporated BTLE into their solutions to also include an implantable device. This is huge as it overcomes that argument that Wi-Fi and or BTLE is not safe, reliable, or secure. The implantable device company followed all NIST guidelines. https://www.nist.gov/topics/cryptography
We additionally see the whole proprietary real time location system model becoming legacy as BTLE 5.1 provides the granularity of accuracy. Also BTLE is fast becoming incorporated in WLAN enterprise AP(s) to include mesh capabilities
Bottom line, while proprietary wireless technology may have had it's place in healthcare; standards based architecture always wins out. It wins out because of the ground swell of investment, standards, interoperability, security, and wide spread adoption driving down cost.
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