Smartphones will soon be diagnosing illness as well as advising on cures. Will we all become iPho-chondriacs?
Lena Bryce’s mobile phone got her pregnant. Dan Woolley’s kept him alive for days under a collapsed building. Fran Neri’s saved her from a life-threatening infection. A fast-growing array of downloadable applications for smartphones is turning the mobile phone into a doctor in your pocket, on constant call to diagnose ills and propose cures. Soon mobile apps could even provide lifesaving home treatment for millions. That’s the upside. Experts warn, though, that apps may turn us into a neurotic nation of phone-hugging iPho-chondriacs.
Apps are software programs that run on smartphones such as the iPhone, Google Android, Palm and Blackberry. Where once mobiles were just for calls, texts and taking snaps, apps transform them into machines that can monitor your sleep, give you perfect abs, help you to conceive or even cure your acne. Apple says that about 100 million apps are downloaded each month from its website alone; many of them free.
There are already more than 2,000 health-related apps on offer. You can test your hearing with Unitron’s uHear and learn how to resuscitate someone with Zoll Medical’s PocketCPR. WaveSense’s Diabetes Manager offers a record-keeping system that helps diabetics to track their glucose results, carbohydrate intake and insulin doses. The AcneApp, meanwhile, promises to clear your skin with light-therapy delivered from the phone’s screen. It projects bursts of blue and red light that are believed to have antibacterial and anti-inflammatory powers. The claim, however, has got expert dermatologists rubbing their chins.
Beyond this lies a revolutionary future where cheap app technology can monitor our health wherever we are, diagnose conditions, deliver medicines into our bodies — and chide us for lazing about. Paul Williamson, the head of wireless medical at Cambridge Consultants, a company that develops new products, says that while consumer health is one of the three fastest growing areas in apps, the serious commercial interest lies in the next level, where wearable or implanted monitors upload information about your body on to your phone, which then transmits it to health experts.
Health apps are already transforming lives. Lena Bryce used one to conceive her daughter born in January. Bryce, 30, from Glasgow, and her husband had been trying for a family for four years and were starting to consider IVF or adoption. The FertilityFriend app she downloaded on to her iPhone used information about her body to predict when she was most fertile. It even suggested sexual positions to optimise her chances. Within two months, she was pregnant.
Dan Woolley says he might not be alive if it were not for a first-aid app he downloaded from the American Heart Association. Woolley was caught in the Haitian earthquake while making a film about child poverty. As he lay injured in the rubble of his hotel, “I looked up excessive bleeding and I looked up compound fracture,” he says. The app showed him how to bandage his injured leg with his shirt and use his belt to stem the blood loss. It also cautioned against drifting off to sleep, so he set his iPhone’s alarm to ring every 20 minutes. After 65 hours, he was pulled to safety.
Fran Neri of Muirhouse, Edinburgh, was taken to hospital with cellulitis, a bacterial infection that can develop into potentially fatal septicaemia, after her boyfriend sent phone-video of her badly swollen legs to an NHS 24 doctor.
Scientists are developing app technology that will automatically recognise photos of dangerous medical problems. Already a range of apps for doctors offers electronic second opinions as well as double-checks of drug doses.
The potential is so great, says Williamson, that rival corporations are collaborating to ensure that their gadgets talk to each other. Odd as it seems to have a bunch of appliances discussing your health via your mobile, it is happening now, says Williamson. Electronic scales can upload your weight on to your mobile, and an app can advise you what to eat that day. The £119 Withings WiFi Body Scales also acts as an “I tweet your weight” machine, recruiting peer pressure to bolster slimmers’ resolve. Joseph Kvedar, the director of the Massachusetts-based Centre for Connected Health, is tweeting data from his scales. He explained via Twitter: “The goal is to see if my followers will help me keep down around 182lb-183lb.”
Beyond fighting flab, companies are developing systems to help us to fend off the Reaper. Michael Reilly, the director of Orange Healthcare UK, says his organisation is completing a trial of phone-connected devices that enable hospital doctors to monitor remotely the health of patients in their own homes. He says: “The trial, at Navarra University Hospital, in Spain, focuses on people with diabetes, but the technology can also be used with conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease.”
Many corporations are racing to develop mobile health — or mHealth as the industry calls it. In America, Johnson & Johnson’s Lifescan unit is piloting an app that lets users upload readings from their wearable blood-glucose monitors to their iPhones. Meanwhile a wearable wireless skin patch is being developed by Gentag to send an alert to a patient’s mobile if he or she develops complications at home after surgery. The patch may be part of a “Wiban”, a wireless network that monitors all your vital signs.
“This market is worth billions,” says Reilly. “There are potentially 300 million people in the West who would benefit from phone-linked home care. The cost of running a health system based on hospital beds and buildings can’t be sustained [particularly with an ageing population] .”
But we won’t only be monitored; we may also be nagged via our mobile nannies. The pharmaceutical company Novartis has agreed a £15 million deal with Proteus Biomedical to create “smart pills” that transmit data from inside your body to your phone to check you have taken medicines as prescribed. If not, you may expect a text reminding you of the physical penalties of non-compliance.
This may not stop at treating illness. Houston University scientists have created an app called Walk’n’Play that tracks people’s physical activity. The researchers say that it will enable them to list the fattest and fittest cities in the world as a way of encouraging people to exercise more.
It’s easy to see where this may land us. Are you ready to receive a daily sat-nag from your mobile phone?
Apps that offer a helping hand
Fertilityfriend
An app that tells you when in the month you will be most fertile and suggests the best sexual positions for getting pregnant too
Sleep aid
For the sleep deprived, an app that records a person snoring and maps it on a graph. Snorers can compare their graphs to sample clips of regular snoring, and find out if they have sleep apnea
Unitron uhear
If you’re worried about deafness, use this test to measure your hearing at different frequencies and your ability to understand speech when it’s noisy
Apps are software programs that run on smartphones such as the iPhone, Google Android, Palm and Blackberry. Where once mobiles were just for calls, texts and taking snaps, apps transform them into machines that can monitor your sleep, give you perfect abs, help you to conceive or even cure your acne. Apple says that about 100 million apps are downloaded each month from its website alone; many of them free.
There are already more than 2,000 health-related apps on offer. You can test your hearing with Unitron’s uHear and learn how to resuscitate someone with Zoll Medical’s PocketCPR. WaveSense’s Diabetes Manager offers a record-keeping system that helps diabetics to track their glucose results, carbohydrate intake and insulin doses. The AcneApp, meanwhile, promises to clear your skin with light-therapy delivered from the phone’s screen. It projects bursts of blue and red light that are believed to have antibacterial and anti-inflammatory powers. The claim, however, has got expert dermatologists rubbing their chins.
Beyond this lies a revolutionary future where cheap app technology can monitor our health wherever we are, diagnose conditions, deliver medicines into our bodies — and chide us for lazing about. Paul Williamson, the head of wireless medical at Cambridge Consultants, a company that develops new products, says that while consumer health is one of the three fastest growing areas in apps, the serious commercial interest lies in the next level, where wearable or implanted monitors upload information about your body on to your phone, which then transmits it to health experts.
Health apps are already transforming lives. Lena Bryce used one to conceive her daughter born in January. Bryce, 30, from Glasgow, and her husband had been trying for a family for four years and were starting to consider IVF or adoption. The FertilityFriend app she downloaded on to her iPhone used information about her body to predict when she was most fertile. It even suggested sexual positions to optimise her chances. Within two months, she was pregnant.
Dan Woolley says he might not be alive if it were not for a first-aid app he downloaded from the American Heart Association. Woolley was caught in the Haitian earthquake while making a film about child poverty. As he lay injured in the rubble of his hotel, “I looked up excessive bleeding and I looked up compound fracture,” he says. The app showed him how to bandage his injured leg with his shirt and use his belt to stem the blood loss. It also cautioned against drifting off to sleep, so he set his iPhone’s alarm to ring every 20 minutes. After 65 hours, he was pulled to safety.
Fran Neri of Muirhouse, Edinburgh, was taken to hospital with cellulitis, a bacterial infection that can develop into potentially fatal septicaemia, after her boyfriend sent phone-video of her badly swollen legs to an NHS 24 doctor.
Scientists are developing app technology that will automatically recognise photos of dangerous medical problems. Already a range of apps for doctors offers electronic second opinions as well as double-checks of drug doses.
The potential is so great, says Williamson, that rival corporations are collaborating to ensure that their gadgets talk to each other. Odd as it seems to have a bunch of appliances discussing your health via your mobile, it is happening now, says Williamson. Electronic scales can upload your weight on to your mobile, and an app can advise you what to eat that day. The £119 Withings WiFi Body Scales also acts as an “I tweet your weight” machine, recruiting peer pressure to bolster slimmers’ resolve. Joseph Kvedar, the director of the Massachusetts-based Centre for Connected Health, is tweeting data from his scales. He explained via Twitter: “The goal is to see if my followers will help me keep down around 182lb-183lb.”
Beyond fighting flab, companies are developing systems to help us to fend off the Reaper. Michael Reilly, the director of Orange Healthcare UK, says his organisation is completing a trial of phone-connected devices that enable hospital doctors to monitor remotely the health of patients in their own homes. He says: “The trial, at Navarra University Hospital, in Spain, focuses on people with diabetes, but the technology can also be used with conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease.”
Many corporations are racing to develop mobile health — or mHealth as the industry calls it. In America, Johnson & Johnson’s Lifescan unit is piloting an app that lets users upload readings from their wearable blood-glucose monitors to their iPhones. Meanwhile a wearable wireless skin patch is being developed by Gentag to send an alert to a patient’s mobile if he or she develops complications at home after surgery. The patch may be part of a “Wiban”, a wireless network that monitors all your vital signs.
“This market is worth billions,” says Reilly. “There are potentially 300 million people in the West who would benefit from phone-linked home care. The cost of running a health system based on hospital beds and buildings can’t be sustained [particularly with an ageing population] .”
But we won’t only be monitored; we may also be nagged via our mobile nannies. The pharmaceutical company Novartis has agreed a £15 million deal with Proteus Biomedical to create “smart pills” that transmit data from inside your body to your phone to check you have taken medicines as prescribed. If not, you may expect a text reminding you of the physical penalties of non-compliance.
This may not stop at treating illness. Houston University scientists have created an app called Walk’n’Play that tracks people’s physical activity. The researchers say that it will enable them to list the fattest and fittest cities in the world as a way of encouraging people to exercise more.
It’s easy to see where this may land us. Are you ready to receive a daily sat-nag from your mobile phone?
Apps that offer a helping hand
Fertilityfriend
An app that tells you when in the month you will be most fertile and suggests the best sexual positions for getting pregnant too
Sleep aid
For the sleep deprived, an app that records a person snoring and maps it on a graph. Snorers can compare their graphs to sample clips of regular snoring, and find out if they have sleep apnea
Unitron uhear
If you’re worried about deafness, use this test to measure your hearing at different frequencies and your ability to understand speech when it’s noisy
