February 5th, 2011 by Felasfa Wodajo, M.D. in Opinion, Research
No Comments »
The cost of managing chronic diseases is the largest portion of healthcare expenditures in developed countries. For example, the prevalence of adult acquired diabetes has been rising in the United States, in concert with increasing rates obesity. The CDC has termed it an “epidemic,” especially in light of the massive costs incurred by the healthcare system due to diabetes.
The deleterious health effects of many chronic conditions can be diminished by behavior modifications. While few would underestimate the difficulty of having patients lose weight or exercise more, good management of blood sugar in diabetes is both objectively measurable and strongly correlated with reduced end-organ damage.
This is among the reasons why Research2Guidance has recently nominated diabetes as the condition most likely to be most targeted by mobile medical software and devices (mHealth). This finding is part of their recently published Global Mobile Health Market Report 2010-2015. This is the same report that also predicted that, in the future, medical apps are likely to be distributed by physicians and healthcare institutions.
This time Research2Guidance is highlighting the portion of the survey where they looked into where mobile devices have the most potential to affect health outcomes. While other chronic conditions such as hypertension and obesity have larger populations, the market researchers felt diabetes had the largest market potential due to the huge cost saving potential, the demographic and geographic overlap between smartphone users and people with diabetes, and the real potential to improve blood sugar management using mobile devices. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
December 16th, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, Health Tips, News, Research
No Comments »
Imagine a water bottle that knows how hard and how far you are running, how much you’re drinking, what’s the outside temperature, and, based on all these variables, the device calculates when you need to have a drink. Cambridge Consultants have developed the i-dration bottle that does just that.
From the press release:
Intelligent sensors in the i-dration bottle can be used to monitor the external temperature, drinking frequency and quantity, and this data is then sent via Bluetooth to its user’s smartphone. The phone’s inbuilt accelerometer and gyroscope can measure exercise levels, and by “fusing” the data from a heart rate chest-band and information pre-entered using the smartphone interface (such as height, age and weight), the application can perform an assessment of a user’s hydration levels. The i-dration bottle then responds accordingly by flashing a blue light if the athlete needs to drink more. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
November 18th, 2010 by Berci in Better Health Network, Health Tips, News, Research
No Comments »
Although I can check the calorie content of any food on WolframAlpha, it’s good to have a site that focuses only on this issue:
PhotoCalorie is an application inspired by the ideas of Dr. Mark Boguski of Harvard Medical School, who realized that the current methods available to track your daily nutrient intake are monotonous and simply too complicated. As a result, people would lose interest in tracking their diet or stop the diet all together. Our mission is to create the easiest food journal on the planet to help dieters lose weight and monitor their diet with ease.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
November 9th, 2010 by Felasfa Wodajo, M.D. in Better Health Network, News, Research
No Comments »
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*
October 24th, 2010 by Iltifat Husain, M.D. in Better Health Network, News, Research
No Comments »
A new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows how the proliferation of smart mobile devices is causing a shift in the way users are accessing data and information on health.
Some of the most interesting findings are related to the substantial number of users who actually have applications that help them manage and track their health. Some key findings from the survey:
*17 percent of cell owners have used their phone to look up health or medical information on the Internet; 29 percent of cell owners ages 18 to 29 have done such searches.
*9 percent of cell phone owners have apps they use to help track and manage health.
*The heaviest use of health or medical related apps was by young adults: About 15 percent of those ages 18 to 29 have such apps, compared to 8 percent of cell users ages 30 to 49. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
