LONDON — At home or on the go, there’s always a good doctor around these days. If you have diabetes, asthma or heart disease, there’s almost certainly an elegant smart-phone interface at your disposal.
Even if you simply don’t know where to look for good medical advice and treatment, the wireless world is at your disposal.
Personal devices have, in fact, never been so personal, and developers, doctors, companies and health care providers are scrambling to figure out how to harness the increasing convergence of the mobile and the medical.
While consumer interest in mobile health services is growing, the industry itself is beset with an array of issues: privacy, regulation, standards and even a question of where to focus efforts.
Most in the industry agree that mobile health is primarily about chronic-disease management, but there is divergence over how mobile phones fit within the mobile- health ecosystem, if at all.
On issues such as selection, security, platform, connectivity strategies and other coordination-sensitive systems, consensus has yet to emerge with respect to applications for consumers as well as for the professional health care market.
“The mobile phone, like your wallet and keys, is the one thing you don’t leave home without,” said Brian Dolan, editor and co-founder of , a Web portal that tracks the wireless-medical world.
“The U.S. medical system is an overtaxed system, and we need to extend the reach of health care providers,” Dolan said. “The way to do this is to add connectivity to the patient, no matter where they might be. We need to take advantage of the technology people are already using today — the mobile phone.”
As smart phones move closer to personal computers, one area where consumers are displaying an interest is in medical-related applications that can be purchased at online destinations such as Apple’s App Store. But these new offerings are not helping consumers make an informed decision.
“There is a huge amount of interest in this area,” said Peter Bentley, creator of iStethoscope, an app that transforms Apple’s iPhone into a stethoscope, thus permitting monitoring of the heartbeat in just about every conceivable setting (save for extremely noisy ones).
“But regulators are still trying to figure out the blurred distinctions between apps and medical devices,” said Bentley, a computer-science professor at University College London, and “the more established doctors may find the new technology somewhat baffling.”
Marketplace changing
Smart phones and tablets may not be ready to replace hospital devices just yet, but it’s safe to say that looking ahead, “the marketplace will be dramatically different,” said Joseph White, an American doctor with an interest in mobile-health issues.
“Bedsides EKG, ultrasound, pulse oximetry, blood-pressure monitor, glucose monitor — doctors will eventually have access to these types of monitoring capabilities when they visit patients at home.”
Mobile health consists of an array of overlapping technologies encompassing computers, patient monitors, PDAs, automated voice-mail technologies and apps for mobile phones. It spans the business-to- business market as well as the consumer market.
The health care industry has long had access to an extensive portfolio of mobility-related products, from wearable wireless sensors to personalized pills containing microchips that can tell you when your medication hit your stomach. But the medical-app world as it relates to the consumer has only recently started to find its feet. Ultimately, it’s not yet clear how useful apps will be for diagnostic purposes.
