Re: Islands of Automation
Well, part of the point of the conference was that these gadgets and apps are worth more if aggregated together and that tech firms ought to be partnering with each other and with healthcare firms to assemble them into a greater whole. From a technologist's perspective, the danger is that this results in a horde of one-off interfaces and proprietary APIs. So standards will need to emerge, whether de facto or formal.
I mentioned The Activity Exchange as one firm tying together healthcare data from multiple sources, and bigger players are targeting this, too.
WebMD, which has an established brand as a portal for consumer health info, wants to make a play here by also being a repository for aggregated health inf. Of course, that means they will have to wade deeper into the territory of managing personal health info and complying with HIPAA etc, which they haven't had to deal with before now.