There's an App for That: Smartphone Healthcare Improvements

Currently technology is becoming a main part of life, particularly cell phone usage. This article relates the futuristic ties that smart phone usage could soon have with the medical field.

According to the article, in 2009 81% of all people in the U.S. owned a mobile device. Currently, about 85% of people in the U.S. own a mobile device with roughly 50% of that being smart phone owners. The continual rise has shown promising growth for cell phone companies such as AT&T and Sprint, it also has contributed to the growth of app companies. Currently, there are over 7000 health related apps that are on the market. Multiple examples of these were pointed out in the article including: apps to assist doctor’s diagnosis of patients, apps of medicine lists to assist nurses, apps of common sickness and remedies, and many more.

One of the newest ideas that has surfaced is the usage of fully integrated health system monitors into a smart phone app. A possible prospect for this idea is a product known as Enhanced Complete Ambient Living Experiment (eCAALYX). The patient would wear a “smart garment” which is described as a tee-shirt with senors imbedded into the fabric. This smart garment would include accelerometers measuring motion and gait, infrared detectors measuring body temperature and heart rate, and glucometers measuring blood glucose. The article also discussed the possibility of measuring specific health concern via implanted sensors in the person’s body. The sensors would then relay the information to the phone using Bluetooth capabilities.

The eCAALYX did not stop at only relaying the information to the person’s smart phone. The article also mentioned that the design would include interface with the user’s caretaker or clinician, if necessary. Either a continuous reading or an interval reading would be transmitted using W3C web services technology. This would allow caretakers and doctors to have continuous data regarding a person’s health. This could drastically improve people who are infected with chronic diseases because the doctor could diagnose treatment daily without actually having to meet with the person. It also would simplify the doctor’s job because it would give multiple days of readings by which to base diagnosis on. The current prototype phone that the app will be tested on is the Google Nexus running on the Android 2.1 platform with a 1 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM memory, however, the article states that as the bugs are worked out it should be compatible with any newer android version smart phone.

There are many problems discussed in the article that could potentially move the project completion deadline back from July 2012. One major problem is privacy issues. If a person’s phone is a taken or lost the individual who finds their phone would have access to almost all of their health information. Also, since the App includes a sensor interface then the FDA may monitor it as a medical device which would slow the release date of the app significantly.

Currently, there are not any clinical trials or evaluation tests from the eCAALYX but they are expected to begin surfacing near its completion date in July 2012. The eCAALYX mobile app will undoubtedly provide an excellent class of smartphone apps that will be used in chronic disease management and telehealthcare.

I found this article a very interesting example of how the development of areas of technology outside the health field can be integrated using biomedical engineering to drastically improve a patient’s healthcare. The full text of the article I discussed can be found at http://www.biomedical-engineering-online.com/content/10/1/24.