Apple periodically updates its app store with lists of apps for particular groups of people. Even as the new iOS 8, with a built in Health app, goes into beta, Apple has added a new list: "Apple's Apps for Diabetics." According to the CDC's 2011 fact sheet, diabetes affects 25.8 million people, or 8.3 percent of the US population.
The apps on Apple's list aren't all from the US, and they don't...
Ever since Apple's AppStore created a dedicated category for medical applications for the iPhone and iTouch, it seems that "the medical community is flocking to the iPhone," as an Apple executive put it last summer.
Back then we cobbled together the first half of the timeline featured below. At the time the launch of the iPhone 3.0 operating system, was the talk of the mHealth town square,...
As part of its recent interest in all things mobile health, a headline over at Scientific American this week asked a weighty question: Should medical apps face governmental oversight? The answer to that question is one we have tracked consistently over the past year and a half, but the quick and easy version of it might be: They already do.
A month ago, MobiHealthNews broke the story of the FDA's...
"Maybe with all that ARRA money floating about in the HITECH Act, ONC should just go ahead and build such an 'open' platform that supports modular apps to meet specific needs wihin this highly fragmented market. Seriously, this needs some consideration," Chilmark Research Principal John Moore wrote last year after reading about a proposal by Boston researchers to create an "iPhone-like" platform...
"The iPhone has created a new direction for our company," Mark Cain, CTO, MIMvista said in June 2008. "We have taken a complex desktop application removed it from the realm of black art and placed it in the hands of physicians and patients. And we have only just scratched the surface."
Cain's remarks were part of his presentation at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference in June 2008 -- the...
Medical device connectivity and workflow automation consultant, Tim Gee, also known as the Connectologist, started a helpful discussion on LinkedIn about Apple's recently disclosed developer agreement and its moves to avoid FDA regulation. As we reported recently, the agreement puts the onus on medical app developers to clear their app with the FDA if necessary and to not involve Apple in any way...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has indicated in the past that under certain circumstances the iPhone may be considered a medical device and therefore regulated as one, however, as of February the FDA still hadn't figured out exactly which circumstances those might be.
Turns out Apple isn't waiting around for the FDA. iPhone application developer and GraniteKey COO Mike Ahmadi wrote in to...
Heavy, expensive and huge text-to-speech machines may be a thing of the past for parents of autistic children or for families caring for a loved one with Lou Gehrig's Disease, Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, ALS or who had suffered through a stroke. Mobile health applications are set to disintermediate the bulky text-to-speech machine market, according to a report in USA Today.
iPhone app...
Nokia's Ovi Store, which is the mobile phone giant's answer to Apple's iPhone AppStore, launched yesterday, and it is severely lacking in medical, health and fitness applications. As we have noted recently, the iPhone now has more than 1,500 health-related applications. Granted, the AppStore had a couple years head start on Nokia, but the Finnish phone maker has taken its time and -- at first...
Last month at the Health 2.0 meets Ix conference here in Boston, we covered The Pew Internet & American Life Project's health research and digital strategy head Susannah Fox's presentation on the opportunity that mobile devices present for engaging different populations in managing their own care. At the time, Fox noted that despite the opportunity mobile presents, there are pockets of people...
