From Applications to Texting, Using Cell Phones for Health
With the cell phone strapped on the right wrist a patient speaks with his doctor about his diabetes. This patient uses his cell phone to help him with monitoring his diabetes. It’s part of a program that uses interactions with his cell phone in order to help supervise chronic diseases.
With those nagging text messages or a more customized two-way interaction the researches are working toward harnessing the power of cell phones to help people fight their chronic diseases. One doctor refers to it as medical minutes.
The doctor is testing whether the diabetics in the inner city, who is a very difficult to treat populace, could better manage their blood sugar through tracking their disease through an internet connected cell phone provided with some reduced monthly rates based upon regular compliance. This would also save a lot of money in Medicaid dollars.
Consider the patient that we talked about above. He learned that he had diabetes only after he had actually gotten so ill he had to be admitted to the hospital for a week and has been struggling with lowering his blood sugar ever since then. Back in May he through a study at the clinic testing the cell phones and health he received a web based individual health documentation and all he has to do is click onto it through his cell phone and it will record his blood sugar measurements on a daily basis.
If the reading that he enters is lower or higher than the danger thresholds, preset, he’ll get an immediate text message as a warning which will tell him what he needs to do. At checkups his doctor will use that personal health record in order to track any and all fluctuations and be able to make the decision on what to advice next.
Mobile Health
This new trend is called mobile health. If you’re someone that’s a savoir-faire smartphone user you’ve likely seen a lot of applications which claim that they’ll help you get to your health or fitness goal through using your phone like an alarm clock or a pedometer to signal when it’s time for you to take your medication(s).
Other researchers and doctors are taking this much further through testing scientifically whether or not more personalized cell phone applications could link a patient’s care with their doctors set disease management efforts in a way that could provide a long lasting improvement in health.
Mobile phones can provide the opportunity for people to be able to get immediate feedback that they need, when they need it. With over 5 billion cell phones on the planet most all of the population is carrying one. Also more and more users are accessing the internet, 40% of them. This allows for there to be more sophisticated levels of digital health contact. The one caveat to that is that older and very sick people are a lot less likely to do so. Almost anyone can handle a very simple text message program though.
So do these technologies work? There’s short term data says that it will although nobody knows if people are actually going to stick with it in the long term, especially for the less critical medical applications, after the novelty has worn off. Time will be the judge.
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Tags: apps, cell phone apps