Tag: MHealth

Do It Yourself Health

swebmanLeave a comment

Smartphones empower us with information, ease of access, games, social interaction and many other opportunities to connect in real time to just about anything that we are interested in.  Many of the applications that are available have been created to put us in charge of our lives and to expand the utilization of do-it-yourself tools.  For example, your banking application let’s you do just about everything (pay bills, transfer money etc.), Pandora/Spotify let you listen to any genre, artist etc. and PayPal let’s you make payments and transfer money in a more secure way.  The headline on all of these applications is that they empower you to do-it-yourself.

Another area where consumers are moving to do-it-yourself is with monitoring our own health.  Today, there are over 9,000 mobile health applications available in Apple’s app store.  That’s right over 9,000 mobile health applications.  These applications are in the areas of cardio-fitness, diets, stress and relaxation and specific men’s and women’s health apps. http://mobihealthnews.com/

As a way of introducing you to these amazing capabilities, here are a couple of examples of some of the current options:

  • Jawbone’s Up is a wristband personal tracking device that tracks a user’s moving,eating and sleeping patterns. The device syncs with an iPhone app, and users can set the device to vibrate when they have been inactive for a period, compete against friends and even earn real life rewards for completing activity challenges.  http://jawbone.com/up
  • The Play It Down app enables users to test their hearing.  The app offers several interactive features including ‘The Ear Knob’ that lets friends compare who can hearthe highest frequencies, and ‘The Volume Zone’ which measures sound volume in decibels.  http://playitdown.org/
  • Withings‘ Blood Pressure Monitor plugs into an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch and takes the user’s blood pressure. Data can be sent directly to a doctor or published (confidentially) on the Web.  http://www.withings.com/en/bloodpressuremonitor
  • US automotive company Ford demonstrate three apps offering in-car health monitoring. The sample apps use Ford’s SYNC Applink software to enable drivers to access certain mobile health apps while driving to keep track of chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma and hay fever.  http://corporate.ford.com/news-center/press-releases-detail/pr-ford-and-healthcare-experts-34627

As consumers, we now have the ability to consistently monitor our health, get recommendations for improvement and learn more about how to stay healthy.  The above examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

Let me know what you think of this article by commenting below.

Have a great day.

Webman