The worldwide market for home health monitoring of "welfare diseases" was worth about € 7.6 billion ($10 billion) in 2010, according to Berg Insight. The conditions most commonly treated via these remote monitoring services include diabetes, cardiac arrhythmia, sleep apnea, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the report found. More than 200 million people in the EU and the US suffer from one or more chronic conditions where remote monitoring would be helpful.

Oddly, a similar report from Berg Insight released late last year estimated that the market for home health monitoring of chronic diseases was already an $11 billion market in 2008 and back then some 300 million people in the EU and the US were said to suffer from one or more chronic conditions that could benefit from remote monitoring services. At the time Berg said the market would grow about 10 percent annually, which if these numbers are correct, seems to have proven untrue?

Interestingly, consumer-oriented health and wellness monitoring will drive the mobile health segment of home health monitoring in the near-term, according to Berg, which pointed to a "growing number of wellness and medical monitors" that can connect to mobile phones via Bluetooth and other short-range technologies. The firm also noticed that "more and more" health and wellness smartphone apps are becoming available via app stores, but as we concluded in our own recent mobile health apps report, the number of apps that aim to help patients better self-manage chronic conditions is still a very small fraction of the health-related apps available for smartphones today.

“Progress is being made in the adoption of wireless technology among manufacturers of medical monitoring equipment, but there is still a long way to go before remote monitoring becomes a standard practise in the healthcare sector,” Senior Analyst André Malm of Berg Insight stated in a press release.