I love the smell of tradeshows in the morning.

Brian Dolan, Editor, mobihealthnews

Good thing, too, because the mobihealthnews team has spent the last two weeks at three of them: CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas (sunny/mild), BodyNets in Los Angeles (sunny/warm), and HIMSS in Chicago (snowy/cold then sunny/warm). The city of HIMSS clearly produced superior beer selections (Chicago's Goose Island 312), but the CTIA Wireless and BodyNets events had their cuff-less wireless sensors finely tuned to the mobile health industry's pulse. HIMSS was too distracted by the tens of billions of dollars in the economic stimulus package (they call it "ESP") for electronic medical records (EMR) to focus on anything else.

Hard to blame HIMSS for that, but here's hoping the collective effervescence dies down by next year.

While traveling from CTIA Wireless to BodyNets to HIMSS, I couldn't help but think back to the authoritative Telemedicine 2.0 report (2007) penned by investment firm Triple Tree's Rob McCray. In it, McCray classifies the wireless health industry into three key buckets: Infrastructure & Communications, Clinical Wireless Solutions, and Personal Wireless Solutions.

Each of the aforementioned events fits into one of these buckets. Here's which and why:

Infrastructure & Communications: HIMSS. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society trade show brings together all facets of healthcare IT, including wireless enterprise IT technologies, which mostly runs over WLAN like WiFi. These include companies selling wireless VoIP solutions, ruggedized handsets for clinicians, mobile EHR applications for physicians and more. 

Clinical Wireless Solutions: BodyNets. Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) or Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) are mostly leveraged by clinicians in therapeutic devices that work to deliver clinical care to patients when they are outside the clinic. As we learned at BodyNets, if a hacker "spoofs" a WPAN and takes control of a body sensor that delivers critical information to a clinician, the results could be deadly. An example is hacking into a wireless-enabled cardiac monitoring device. Security is top of mind for these services as a result.

Personal Wireless Solutions: CTIA Wireless. Naturally the cellular industry is largely interested in the convergence of healthcare and fitness where it intersects with the mobile phone as the hub. Many of these solutions lead to Personal Health Solutions delivered via the wireless carrier's WWAN. As we learned at CTIA, remote monitoring of chronic diseases via WWAN could save more than $20 billion; personalized participatory health care centered on wireless technologies has the greatest chance of relieving the U.S.'s overwhelmed healthcare industry; there are 10 diseases that are currently benefiting (or soon will) from wireless-enabled personal healthcare services.

Of course, there were a few surprise exceptions like the wireless sensors-enabled toothbrush project under development at Rice University that we heard about at BodyNets -- clearly a personal health solution, but one that depends on wireless sensors and a body area network. Or how about the mobile clinical assistant tablet Verizon Chairman Ivan Seidenberg said he was "very excited" about at CTIA? That's more of an Infrastructure & Communications solution for use over a hospital's WLAN.

Next week brings more mHealth news live from Washington, D.C. where the World Health Care Congress convenes. Mobile EHRs look to be the talk of our nation's capital next week. As always, drop us a note if you'll be attending.