Publishing and adopting a standard is by no means enough. Without test documentation, certification services, and a logo license agreement, interoperability is an illusion.
As I’ve tried to point out the specific details of the healthcare infrastructure in this post, I want to dwell a bit more today on how interoperability is actually achieved with these different standards. The problem this market faces basically is that all measuring devices, weight scales or sensor running shoes, have to connect to a mobile phone and a telecom network and these phones cannot connect directly to one another but have to pass through the network. How many players are there on the mobile market? The big ones are relatively few but there are also small ones we are seldom aware of. All these companies undergo extensive tests before launching a product on the market but the bottom line has it that each and every single device in a family is different from the competition. And yet we expect them to synchronize different email address with them and take good quality pictures and have a good functioning time and connect to headsets and so on and so forth. We want it to achieve interoperability.
The testing against certain standards has to follow a certain procedure. Usually this procedure is established by the standardization body. What organizations like Bluetooth SIG have done is to invest in automated interoperability testing equipment. They did it in 2005 for Bluetooth. Bluetooth LE will follow in the same footsteps and will have millions of dollars invested so as to guarantee interoperability.
That is the story with Bluetooth Low Energy, but Continua Alliance has selected also ZigBee and a number of other standards to ensure the integrity of data from sensor to the medical record systems. Most people think there is a competition between these two low energy standards (ZigBee and BT LE), but in reality the organization has selected them to perform different functions.
Looking back, when Bluetooth was announced it was highly rumored and believed that the end of IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN’s was approaching fast, since the difference between LAN and PAN were not so concrete. History is repeating with many people believing that that BT LE and ZigBee PRO are competing for the winning spot. Many argue that Bluetooth low energy will be the next IT thing, because it is packaged together with classic Bluetooth, thus it will automatically be included in devices already using Bluetooth. However, there is not one single standard to achieve interoperability and Continua Alliance was able to accept it and formally introduce this concept.
BT LE cannot perform LAN functions and ZigBee cannot perform PAN functions and that is it. Do we accept it? As users, we have little influence. We cannot demand a certain technology to a producer. Perhaps we can compare devices with features implemented with the two technologies but when trying to fill the same gap. Continua will achieve interoperability while trying to get all these technologies to work together, complementing each other.
If this strategy of the organization can be put down to a good premonition of how the PAN and LAN will not evolve to become one single interface, or to a good business vision, since both standards are backed up by wealthy companies, cannot be asserted for sure. Nevertheless, interoperability with just one standard is rarely achievable even when the extensive tedious tests are complete. So, the more the merrier, I say.
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