An App for All That
Smartphones have changed the way that many of us live our daily lives. From simple apps like the calendar and to-do lists to sophisticated drug reference apps, the smartphone is here to stay and will only be further integrated into our way life. While not everyone is on-board with this wave, you can be sure that many patients are using apps to help manage their lives and health. Therefore, it is necessary for clinicians to become familiar with the technology to partner with their patients to help them use these apps in a meaningful and effective way.
Recent market research suggests that sports, fitness, and wellness apps will grew to a $400 million market by 2016. Much of this growth will come from wearable devices that will communicate and be stored via the smartphone. Clinicians will be able to review the data with their patients and can potentially get much more accurate data such as blood pressure readings and blood glucose readings than the ones collected in their offices.
Three examples of very innovative apps that are meant for wellness/fitness are:
- Macaw – is a free app that is acts a personal health monitor by tracking exercise via syncing with things like wireless pedometers and puts together a personal health profile.
- GAIN Fitness – is a free app that acts as your personal trainer by putting together a custom work-out for you.
- Lumoback – is a free app that interacts with purchased wireless sensors placed on your back to monitor posture throughout the day. When posture is incorrect, the sensors vibrate to signal you to change position to improve posture and thus reduce back maladies.
The technology is not stopping there. Helius, a system combining an ingestible pill with a built-in sensor, a wearable skin sensor, and a smartphone app will monitor when patients take medications and confirm that the correct medications were taken at the right time.
For any of these apps to be effective long-term, the gathered information must be reviewed with the health care team. Therefore, the team members must become familiar of this new wave of health monitoring in the ultimate hopes of improving quality and health care outcomes while spending health dollars more efficiently. The future of health information apps has arrived and it will be exciting to see the impact they have on our nations health.
