HealthMash, WebLib’s next-generation semantic health search engine, will release an iPhone application in January. It utilizes proprietary natural language processing and semantic technology tools and resources in order to find highly relevant, reliable, and recent health information from the most trusted sources and facilitate user exploration and discovery.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
In the future your medical apps might come from your hospital, not your app store. So says a recently published report by Research2Guidance, a mobile technology research company based in Germany. In their report, titled “Health Market Report 2010-2015″ the market researchers came to the conclusion that the dominant mode of application distribution in the future will be from doctors, hospitals and other care providers.
The report also painted a bullish picture of healthcare app adoption, estimating that the number of users of mHealth apps on smartphone phones will reach 500m by 2015. However, the revenue from this sector will still be driven mostly by device sales and through provision of services, rather than by paid downloads.
The report preview shows it to be organized into three “dimensions”: a) The smartphone market, b) The current state of the mHealth market & c) mHealth outlook to 2015. One would imagine that the last portion will be the most avidly read read as the numerous stockholders in mHealth — telecoms, device makers, insurance and pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and entrepreneurs jockey to position themselves in this rapidly-evolving land grab. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
What do cell phones and health-information seeking have in common? Very little, at least among the chronically ill (e.g., the folks who are driving healthcare use and cost). An American Medical News article about the latest Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project study on mobile phone use caught my eye. The introduction to the article reads:
Despite the proliferation of cell phones in the United States, the number of people using them to access health information is low. But experts believe the sheer number of people using mobile phones and wireless devices means that health information eventually will get more mobile as well.
According to the study, 85 percent of Americans use mobile phones, but only 17 percent of cell phone owners have used them to look up health information. Nine percent of Americans have downloaded a health-related app on their cell phone.
Get this: The highest use of cell phone health-information seeking and downloading cell phone health apps was among 18- to 29-year olds at 29 percent and 15 percent respectively. With the exception of accidents, 18- to 29-year-old adults are generally among the most healthy demographic. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Mind The Gap*
[We reported last week from the mHealth Summit in Washington, DC — a conference covering the integration of mobile technologies with medical research, information, diagnosis, treatment, and care.]
One of the highlights of last week’s mHealth Summit was the keynote interview of Bill Gates. While inseparable from his history as founder and leader of Microsoft from 1975 to 2008, his current passion is global health.
Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has now given 3.8 billion (with a “b”) of targeted philanthropy into global health since 1994, he and his wife Melinda are helping bring about profound change to the lives of millions around the world. In a meeting dedicated to exploring the power of mobile devices to shape health in developed and developing countries, Bill Gates eloquently refocussed our attention towards the real urgency of saving the millions of our fellow humans who die needlessly for want of vaccinations or the simplest treatments. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
The explosion of smart phones, originally led by the iPhone 2007, has catalyzed the explosion of mobile medical apps which our readers are surely familiar with. But, along with the proliferation of medical reference apps and interfaces to electronic health records (EHRs), there is a much broader world of mobile medical devices and simpler phone interfaces collectively termed “mHealth,” which is an area of intense interest for governments, industry and care providers.
This year, this interest has been punctuated by nearly half a dozen different mobile health meetings — many that iMedicalApps has attended and participated in. Perhaps, the largest one of all — the mHealth Summit — is now in session in the Washington Convention Center, sponsored in part by the Foundation at National Institutes of Health (FNIH) — an event we are currently attending. This type of sponsorship is an indication of the importance mobile health (or “mHealth”) is now reaching. To further accentuate this, the keynote speaker to launch the event was Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH himself. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
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