Last week, Andre Blackman of Pulse + Signal shared a really nice presentation on the use of mobile in health.
The premise is that mobile phones are ubiquitous – and becoming even more so (17.5% of US households are “mobile only!”). And that ubiquity (along with increased functionality in low-cost devices) allows the system to make some quantum leaps in terms of protecting population health. Andre cites 3 specific areas that mobile platforms are beginning to transform health:
- The dissemination of health information quickly, cheaply and in a targeted fashion
- Remote data collection
- Location-specific interaction points for consumer health information
I’ve seen some interesting case studies on the third point, and this week’s H1N1 flu outbreak has been a pretty fascinating case study in terms of both collecting, disseminating and making sense of lots of health data. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that mHealth has the potential to be incredibly powerful in terms of delivering care and preventing & understanding illness. But the beauty is that it doesn’t have to end there. This work and thinking is particularly interesting to me because its so complementary to the ways that we’re using technology in Humana’s innovation center.
We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how the use of technology can influence health – in fact, we have a team that focuses exclusively on Emerging Technology Innovation. But we aren’t actually engaged much with curing disease, explicitly preventing illness or necessarily even educating the public. There are thousands of smart people focused on those things now – and that’s great. But we’re trying to focus on things that are fun to do, and can be made more healthy through technology – including wireless and mobile – or just a little creativity.
- Like the Horsepower Challenge that uses a pedometer to power a web-based video game
- Like the Battle of the Bulge facebook application
- Like location based games that you can play with the streets of a city as your game grid
And dozens of others that you’ll be hearing about this year.
What’s the coolest application you’ve seen applying mobile technology to a health- or sickness- related problem?
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