NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Engineers from Philips Innovation Labs and GE Healthcare in Bangalore are experimenting with mobility platforms and healthcare which will come to life in India soon in the form of a connected medical world. Both companies are spending close to $70-100 million each a year on R&D, to make connected health and home modules a reality.

Walk in to the Philips Innovation Labs and you can find engineers working on home devices that can communicate with each other. These devices have the ability to send messages about a person’s health when he/she is driving or when at work or say when he/she comes back home. These devices, when linked to a smartphone via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, can literally define the house profile of the customer.

These apps can tell the Philips air purifier at home to cleanse the room to remove bad particles and make breathing easy. The app can communicate with the coffee machine to make a cappuccino and when the customer sits down on the sofa the lights in the room will know what level of brightness is best suited for the time of day.