A new research report from Berg Insight estimates that 108 million mobile network connections were being used for machine-to-machine communication at the end of 2011, a 37% increase on the previous year.

Asia-Pacific was the strongest regional market, with a year-on-year growth rate of 64%, while Europe saw annual growth of around 27% to 32.3 million connections.

Vodafone Global Enterprise, the Vodafone business unit that manages multinational customers, has announced an agreement with medical device developer Boston Scientific Corporation.

The two companies aim to develop mobile health solutions that will offer real-time heart monitoring via Vodafone’s machine-to-machine technology.

BMW and Vodafone have announced a partnership that’ll see all new BMW cars in Germany fitted with a special machine-to-machine SIM card.

The Vodafone SIM will work with the BMW ConnectedDrive telematics system, offering a personal concierge service, traffic updates and an emergency call function.

There are some interesting partnerships discussed in today’s podcast, including bada & Tizen, Intel & Motorola and LG & Microsoft. Plus there’s the rest of the week’s mobile industry news, from UK 4G coverage to Apple’s riotous iPhone launch in China.

You can listen to this week’s edition of The Fonecast on our website audio player, via iTunes, by subscribing to our RSS feed or by downloading the MP3.

ABI Research says the number of mobile machine-to-machine connections grew by 26.2% in 2011, rising from a cumulative total of 87.7 million connections worldwide in 2010 to 110.6 million connections at the end of 2011.

That figure is expected to reach 364.5 million connections by 2016, which is the equivalent of a 27% increase each year.