New Bluetooth profiles for heart rate, body temp kit

Two Bluetooth profiles, covering heart rate and temperature monitoring, have been published today as the Bluetooth SIG continues trying to get the world excited by its Low Energy variant.

Bluetooth is already used for both heart and fever monitoring, but a formal profile should enable devices from different manufacturers to work together, and these two are only the first of a handful of new profiles intended to make Bluetooth Low Energy as ubiquitous as its less-frugal sibling.

Bluetooth Low Energy was born of Nokia's Wibree, and enables long sleep periods and very low-power transmissions which should result in a battery life measured in months: essential for the kind of sensor applications which are widely expected to become much more common. Today's release includes sensors for monitoring temperature (so a sticker could send a kid's fever to a mobile phone) and pulse (for those who need to see their heart rate to believe it), but the end of June will see a handful of other profiles added.

Those include an alerting system by which a phone can tell a watch (or similar) that it is ringing or has a new message, and proximity reporting to set off an alarm if two devices are separated to enable child/pet/phone tagging. We'll also see a location profile for tracking down lost Bluetooth devices.

None of these applications are new; we've seen them all before using existing Bluetooth profiles or proprietary radio technologies, but having documented profiles should make them interoperable and the SIG hopes that will encourage manufacturers who have, so far, proved a little sluggish in investing in Bluetooth Low Energy. ®