The NIH mHealth Summer Institute: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the first NIH mHealth Summer Institute set for this summer. The week-long workshop will bring together leaders in mobile health technologies, behavioral science researchers, federal health officials and members of the medical community to provide early career investigators with an opportunity to learn about mHealth research. The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), part of NIH, partnered with Qualcomm to create the workshop. Release
$500K in mHealth grants: The Center for Technology and Aging (techandaging.org) has released grant application guidelines for a $500,000 Mobile Health (mHealth) Diffusion Grants Program. Up to six one-year grants will be made to organizations successfully proposing programs that focus on delivery of health-related services to patients, clinicians and caregivers through mHealth technology platforms on cellular or wireless networks. Details
Microsoft's healthy apps competition: Microsoft announced a competition for health app developers to incentivize them create apps for the Windows Phone 7 platform. Oddly the ten winners will receive an Xbox 360 4GB console with Kinect. I know Kinect has some fitness games and lots of potential, but the prize doesn't really fit the competition, does it? Here's the quick pitch: "Beginning on February 18, 2011, Windows Phone 7 (WP7) partners, developers and software design hobbyists can enter their health and life science applications for Windows Phone 7 for a chance to win an Xbox 360 4GB console with Kinect. Ten (10) winning applications will be selected by our judges. Don't delay—the contest ends June 1, 2011 at 5 p.m. (Pacific Time). Winners will be announced on June 6, 2011." Medgadget
Do-It-Yourself Health Care with Smartphones: That's the misguided title of an article in the New York Times this week. The article starts with the 500 million people will be using mobile health statistic -- which is the best confirmation we have for mHealth being atop the Gartner hype cycle -- and devolves into a discussion about Microsoft's HealthVault, Google Health and other PHRs. New York Times
