Summer 2007 Key Contributors

Rick Zall

Proskauer Rose, Inc.

In May 2007, along with Partners HealthCare, Rick Zall co-organized and co-chaired the Continua-sponsored Personal Health Management Forum at Proskauer's New York offices. An important catalyst to making this forum a reality, Rick provided Proskauer conference facilities at no cost and was one of three individuals personally involved with setting the program for the day and recruiting speakers. The forum, geared toward large employer human resource senior executives, featured Continua and many of its member companies and addressed the potential use of connected devices in employee health benefit management programs. In co-organizing this forum with Partners HealthCare, Rick went above and beyond to help advance Continua's interests. The forum helped to spark increased interest and excitement in this important focus area. Further, it led to a spontaneous grass roots effort among Continua members to formalize a previously discussed reimbursement workgroup subcommittee geared toward large employers. The forum will likely be an annual event and Rick's activities and energies here have been exemplary in helping to advance Continua and its mission.

David Simons

Philips Research Europe

David Simons is friendly, approachable, knowledgeable, and responsible. He exemplifies a TWG Key Contributor. Mr. Simons has been a strong TWG contributor over this past year by often working off hours to provide detailed reviews for all of the requirements and the standards proposals. He led the E2E team to baseline and then continuously improve the E2E architecture document, effectively reconciling all comments and suggestions. As part of this, he categorized architectural components and provided logical modeling of reference device classes, cardinality, and a reference topology and explained it in easy-to-understand terms.

Currently, Dr. Simons is a senior architect at Philips Research Europe in the area of healthcare systems architecture. From a technology perspective, he and his research team support Philips businesses in medium-to-long term growth opportunities. In scope are applications and services for remote patient management and personal and consumer healthcare.

In this context, he has been participating in the Continua Health Alliance Technical WG, from early on. With the end-to-end architecture sub-team, he will continue to focus on the overarching and longer-term architectural aspects of the Continua interoperability framework.

Previously, Dr. Simons worked as a senior scientist in the area of connectivity middleware for CE home entertainment networking, contributing to both Philips' corporate research programs and external research projects with European partners.

Dr. Simons holds a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the Eindhoven University of Technology. He lives near Eindhoven with his wife and their toddler son.