Most people are unaware of public health recommendations which help reduce the risk of several diseases and health conditions. Healthcare experts and opinion leaders cite overwhelming evidence of an epidemic in diseases such as obesity and diabetes, despite numerous initiatives to educate the public how to prevent morbidity and mortality1. A possible solution is emerging from the use of mobile and wireless technology together with persuasive computing, which could help reform clinical outcomes by improving the quality of healthcare delivery in both urban and rural areas.
Mobile Collaboration
Kostakos and O’Neill consider that humans and computers can work together, completing each other. Computers are suited for memorizing and extracting information, constant monitoring and other monotonous tasks and performing complex calculations while humans are good at identifying patterns, spotting changes and extrapolating from knowledge to experience2. It is essential to remember that the human subject should have higher importance. Computers are the ones that should adapt to our lifestyle, learn our language and gestures and not the other way around. Currently, we are trying to offer our computers a 230V sinusoidal voltage with a 50 Hz frequency in order for them to function properly, but computers do not think about our well-being. It would be interesting to set a computer to ask us every half hour whether or not we are hungry, but it would be annoying at the same time. It would be more interesting to have a computer measure our blood sugar levels in order to suggest us to take a pause. The portability of mobile devices now offers the benefits of such persuasive application in almost every moment of our life.
The present
Mobile healthcare (mHealth) is a term used for the practice of medicine and public health, supported by mobile devices and is becoming an extension of the intersection between technology and healthcare. There are currently over 97,000 health and fitness related mobile apps currently on Google Play and Apple App store and 4 million downloads per day. A study showed that 93% percent of physicians believe that mobile health apps can improve a patient’s health and they find value in having a mobile health app connected to Emergency Health. Currently the majority of the applications available are aimed at weight loss and exercising3.
The future
The healthcare and life sciences industry is recognized as one of the top fields likely to propel mobile device growth in the next five years4. This expected growth is based on the fact that mobile devices enable the provision of high-quality, low-cost health services. One big advantage is that the possibilities of this technology for the future are virtually limitless, ranging from a communication tool that put consumers and professionals in contact regardless of the distance to monitoring application that reports real-time on a patient’s health status.
The future is now
Urgent care - 24/7 Medical Help is the number one medical app on Google Play and iTunes in 2013. The application lets you get in contact with a United States based registered nurse or doctor for advice, diagnosis and prescriptions, 24/7. The application also has an interactive symptom checker that enables you to find quick and easy health advice. Other applications such as Medscape and Epocrates, which are also available on Google Play, enable you to check for potentially harmful drug-drug interactions, identify pills by imprint code, look up adult and pediatric drug dosing information in seconds and give you access to over 100 medical calculators. There are also applications that, based on your input, send you mobile notifications when you are scheduled to take your pills. Applications such as SitCoach monitor the physical activity and the sedentary behavior of an individual and uses timed persuasive messages to suggest active breaks. This is only the first generation of applications that have been made available and further development could help bring to life a wide range of applications that would change our concept of public health.
Conclusion
Given the rate of creative innovation, it is too early to imagine as to where mobile technology may ultimately take the healthcare industry. The advantage of mobile devices is that they can offer greater flexibility and convenience for both patients and providers. At the same time, they supply tools that enable access to real-time data and monitoring. The biggest challenge that the healthcare industry is facing now is finding a way to monetize these mobile-based services, and if it can find one, then mHealth holds great promise for better public health and medicine.
1.E-health current status and future trends (2004) Albert S. Chan - Application of Persuasive Technologies to health care , pages 83-91
2.Kostakos, V. and O'Neill, E. (2003) Introducing Pervasive Computing to Society,
1st UK-UbiNet Workshop, 25-26th September 2003, Imperial Collene, London, UK., pages 1-3
3.Dusan Belic (2013) - Is mobile healthcare the future [infographic] ?
4.Deloitte (2012) - How mobile technology is transforming healthcare, pages 1-10
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