Mobile Phones for e-Health

There is an-ongoing debate about whether mobile phones cause short-term or long-term damage or no damage to humans due to constant-use/radiation. But hey, here is one way mobile phones are definitely useful for your health: e-Health monitoring. For instance (details here):

The Palo Alto Medical Foundation received a $1.2 million grant from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to test a device that can transfer data from glucometers to cell phones to diabetes patients’ electronic health records. The device was developed by iMetrikus, Palm, Epic Systems, Sprint and LifeScan.

Even though a lot of promising work is being done in this field, we still have a long way to go. Researchers, mobile-phone makers, carriers, health-care providers have to come together to provide an effective, standard way of doing this. Issues like: the best way for the various monitoring devices to communicate with mobile-phones; standard formatting for such medical data exchange; easy portability of this data; support from carriers, health-care providers and insurance; will this be ‘easy enough’ for aged people to use; privacy, patient-rights and so on.

The Health 2.0 Conference is being held tomorrow (September 20, 2007) at The Hilton San Francisco (for details, click here).

We will examine this space a little more closely in the coming weeks - stay tuned.

Further Reading:
FierceHealthIT: Trend: Managing chronic diseases remotely, with mobile tech
BBC: Mobiles to check patients’ health