Prototyping an NFC based Personal Health Device

Near field Communication, an emerging player in the healthcare sector offers tremendous potential for penetrating the healthcare and medical fields driven by the smartphone boom. NFC Forum´s recently released technical specification for Personal Health Device Communication (PHDC) addresses the role of NFC in personal health management. This specification enables medical devices like blood pressure monitors, weighing scales and glucose meters to exchange health data via NFC technology with external computers for monitoring and analysis by physicians. As of writing this paper there is no known implementation or medical device in the market supporting the NFC forum´s PHDC. This paper demonstrates a prototype of a health device based on Tizen platform wherein simulated health data is exchanged using NFC PHDC specification.