Dr. Phillip Olla penned a rather comprehensive trend piece on the "M-health phenomenon" over at the MOCOM 2009 site.  Olla lays out his definition of mobile health and also builds the case for why mHealth has serious potential to help improve healthcare for marginalized populations the world over. The author also mentions his upcoming book: Mobile Health Solutions for Biomedical Applications, which I'll be sure to review soon. Here's an excerpt from Olla's lengthy piece:

"Mobile Health (M-Health) contains three important components. The first component is the availability of a reliable mobile or wireless architecture; the second component is the integration of medical sensor or wearable devices for monitoring; the final component is a robust application and services infrastructure. Typically M-Health relates to custom designed applications and systems such as telemedicine, telehealth, e-health and biomedical sensing systems. With the rapid advances in Information Communication Technology (ICT), nanotechnology, bio monitoring, mobile networks, pervasive computing, wearable systems, and drug delivery approaches; the boundaries of M-health are shifting and there is the expectation that with appropriate technology choice we could transform the healthcare sector to generally link their systems with mobile devices. This possibility is fueling the M-health phenomenon. M-Health aims to make healthcare accessible to anyone, anytime, and anywhere by elimination constraints such as time, location in addition to increasing both the coverage and quality of healthcare."

Check out the entire post over at MOCOM 2009.