World’s first standalone iPhone attachment medical device: At the ongoing meeting of Association for the Study of Diabetes in Stockholm, Sweden, Sanofi-aventis unveiled the world’s first attachment to Apple’s (NSDQ:AAPL) iPhone and iPod Touch that is a standalone medical device. Developers Sanofi-aventis and AgaMatrix dubbed their plug-in glucose monitor iBGStar. The system not only relies on the iPhone to perform computational functions and display results — as well as to enter them into iBGStar Diabetes Manager logging software — it also sports AgaMatrix’s proprietary Dynamic Electrochemistry technology to perform glucose measurements. Dynamic Electrochemistry is a technology that essentially takes a time-varying input signal and processes it to deliver much richer digital output with more precise glucose measurements. Without giving out too many details, Sanofi-aventis said that this new method “compensates for many interfering factors that can often distort blood glucose results, helping to ensure accurate and reliable blood glucose readings.”

Thanks to FDA’s arcane pre-internet rules, iBGStar still requires FDA 510(k) clearance in the US, and the clearance might not be coming any time soon, since the iPhone is not a medically approved device. As MedGadget has noted before, “US FDA and other regulatory agencies are far behind the times that we live in, so they have no current policies to deal with the proliferation of mobile computing devices and their potential uses in medicine. Hence, none of the iPhone applications and attachments are classified as medical devices, so they are sold for non medical uses only.”

Google Health expands features and integrates with wellness tracking devices: Google Health rolled out a bunch of new features to allow people to use the service to track their exercise, dieting and other health parameters like blood glucose levels. Users can set goals, take notes and basically use it as a wellness diary. Google wrote in its blog that they integrated the service with several new partners to make it easier for users to collect the data for tracking their fitness progress, "including Fitbit, maker of a wearable device that captures health and wellness data such as steps taken, calories burned and sleep quality; and CardioTrainer, one of the top mobile apps for tracking fitness activity and weight loss. In the two weeks since CardioTrainer’s integration went live, CardioTrainer developer WorkSmart Labs reports that users have already uploaded more than 150,000 workouts to Google Health, where they can more easily view, track and set goals around their workouts and monitor them along with other health and wellness information."

Motorola seeks to support all point-of-care applications with mobile device: Motorola (NYSE:MOT) launched a new handheld device specifically aimed at healthcare professionals, the MC75A0-HC Rugged Healthcare Enterprise Digital Assistant. The device is designed to withstand regular exposure to disinfectants, water and dust, and should survive a five foot drop on a concrete floor. There are a lot features geared towards clinicians, such as push-to-talk communication with other mobile devices, support for “virtually all point-of-care applications,” compatibility with Motorola-HC bar code scanners and HIPAA compliance. The MC75A0-HC runs Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) Mobile 6.5 and is expected to cost around $2000.

MedGadget at the BlackBerry Clinical Collaboration Summit: Last week, Blackberry smartphone maker Research In Motion (NSDQ:RIMM) held a clinical collaboration summit in Boston to discuss their vision of the future of mobile device integration into healthcare IT. Several vendors and app makers attended and shared how they are implementing mobile devices into workflows with RIM, while touting the mobile device company’s superiority in security and data protection through data wiping, access control and audit trail.

One claim that several speakers made was that hours per week could be saved by making clinical and logistical data available on smartphones and that studies have shown clinical information presented on a small screen can be used for mobile situation diagnostic ability, notably for ECG and OB data through companies like AirStrip. A few studies have backed parts of this claim, and a recent paper in the Journal of Hospital Medicine notes: “When smartphones were used for clinical communication, residents perceived an improvement in communication with them. Residents strongly preferred emails as opposed to telephone calls as the prime method of communication. Further objective evaluation is necessary to determine if this intervention improves efficiency and more importantly, quality of care.”

RIM and their collaborators want to replace your pager, wireless phones, iPads and dictaphone with their tools — basically anything not tied down that physicians would want to carry with them, and even some of the things that are tied down. RIM’s focus at the moment is on notification, rather than communication, due to the proliferation of patient management systems, EMRs and smart phones (Amcom and Wallace Wireless were other participants at the conference).

A weekly roundup of new developments in wireless medical technology and mHealth, by MedGadget.com.