Zyxel also won a CEA Innovation Honor for a Smart Home Gateway, which is also a battery-powerd wireless router and will be used as a hub for collecting data from multiple home health monitoring devices. The gateway will go on sale through various resellers in the first quarter. Pricing was not announced.

The gateway can connect to Bluetooth and Zigbee-compliant medical sensors used for various medical duties, including basic blood pressure and heart rate monitoring. Monitors can also be set to detect when a home-based elderly person stops moving, sending an alarm to a distant location over a wired or wireless network, including Wi-Fi 11n and 3G and 4G networks.

"We predict there's going to be a lot of demand for health monitoring applications, and when you consider the millions of baby boomers reaching retirement, it will be huge," Sailana said.

Zyxel has been manufacturing communications products for 20 years and had 3,200 employees with $479 million in revenues in 2008, according to its Web site. Sailana said most of its revenues comes from sales of products such as DSL gateways, switches and wireless routers sold to service providers, but it also makes firewalls and other network and security products sold through resellers as well as consumers products such as wireless routers that are sold online.