ZigBee Health Care Profile Gets Ratified

Typically, when I think of ZigBee I think of wireless protocols for smart homes that are used for communication between devices. I have talked about ZigBee gateways before that enable smart home networks with ZigBee wireless protocols. ZigBee is also useful in other situations as well.

The ZigBee Alliance has announced that a new health care profile has been ratified and is now available for public download. The new profile is designed to make it easy to monitor non-critical information on people in hospitals, nursing homes, and in their own home with no wires.

The new protocol supports thousands of devices on a single network using IEEE 11073 devices. Each of the devices on the network is eligible for FDA certification. Ultimately, the protocol will allow health care providers to monitor things like blood pressure readings, temperature of patients and lots more without actually having to interrupt whatever the person is doing to take manual readings.