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A lot of startups are starting to offer mobile tools to serve as “first lines of defense” for concerned consumers. A natural extension to patient education, they serve as the first line of diagnosis.

 

Dermatology is a particularly attractive area for this because of a national shortage of dermatologists in the United States.

 

Clinical decision support tool maker VisualDx officially launched Aysa, its first consumer-facing app, last month at Health 2.0 in San Francisco. The app allows users to upload pictures of skin lesions or rashes, enter some additional information about themselves and receive suggestions of what condition they might have and what actions to take next.

 

VisualDx stands out as a company that’s moving from provider-focused clinical decision support into the consumer world, which should lend it more credibility to its platform.

 

The app uses machine learning to identify skin conditions and make treatment suggestions.

 

services like this are crucial, even acknowledging their limitations, because people are already looking online for medical answers, so they might as well have the best ones possible.

 

CEO Dr. Art Papier in conversation with MobiHealthNews said 

“We know that everybody searches Google with their symptoms or they go to WebMD and use a symptom checker,” he said. “So the real question is how do you develop something that’s an educational symptom checker that’s safe? The art of this is to do a better job of educating so people know on a weekend, do I need to run to urgent care on a weekend, or can I get some better information that will help me make some decisions and then I’ll see the doctor later if necessary.”

 

read the original story at https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/visualdx-launches-aysa-consumer-facing-dermatology-app

 

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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates everything from heart monitors to horse vaccines, will soon have its hands full with consumer health apps and devices.

The vast majority of the health apps you’ll find in Apple’s or Google’s app stores are harmless, like step counters and heart beat monitors. They’re non-clinical, non-actionable, and informational or motivational in nature.

But the next wave of biometric devices and apps might go further, measuring things like real-time blood pressure, blood glucose, and oxygen levels.

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Your smartphone is not only your best friend, it's also become your personal trainer, coach, medical lab and maybe even your doctor.

"Digital health" has become a key focus for the technology industry, from modest startups' focus on apps to the biggest companies in the sector seeking to find ways to address key issues of health and wellness.

Apps that measure heart rate, blood pressure, glucose and other bodily functions are multiplying, while Google, Apple and Samsung have launched platforms that make it easier to integrate medical and health services.

"We've gotten to a point where with sensors either in the phone or wearables gather information that we couldn't do in the past without going to a medical center," says Gerry Purdy, analyst at Compass Intelligence.

"You can do the heart rate, mobile EKGs (electrocardiograms). Costs are coming down, and these sensors are becoming more socially acceptable."

The consultancy Rock Health estimates 143 digital health companies raised $2.3 billion in the first six months of 2014, already topping last year's amount.

Recent studies suggest that people who use connected devices to monitor health and fitness often do a better job of managing and preventing health problems.

A study led by the Center for Connected Health found that people who use mobile devices did a better job of lowering dangerous blood pressure and blood sugar levels.

A separate study published in the July 2014 issue of Health Affairs found that data collected by devices is not only useful for patients but can help doctors find better treatments.

"When linked to the rest of the available electronic data, patient-generated health data completes the big data picture of real people's needs, life beyond the health care system," said Amy Abernethy, a Duke University professor of medicine lead author of the study.

Some firms have even more ambitious plans for health technology.

Google, for example, is developing a connecting contract lens which can help monitor diabetics and has set up a new company called Calico to focus on health and well-being, hinting at cooperation with rivals such as Apple. And IBM is using its Watson supercomputer for medical purposes including finding the right cancer treatment.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-mobile-tech-reshaping-health-sector.html#jCp

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Nathan E. Wineinger, Ph.D., a research scientist at Scripps Genomic Medicine discusses how mhealth data is moving towards big data at a rapid pace.

 

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies allow for the generation of intensive care unit medical information, literally, in the palm of your hand. A smart phone can be transformed into a mobile heart monitor to diagnose atrial fibrillation, and continuous glucose monitoring has revolutionized the way diabetics manage their blood sugar levels. The digitization of human health through noninvasive devices and sensors can provide meaningful measures of individual wellness outside of a clinical environment.

 

This information can then be used to guide health decisions — or personalize medicine. However, mHealth data presents a computational challenge as it can be both wide and long (i.e. big data). Furthermore, this challenge can be broken into two components that are both vital to the production of actionable health care: data storage and processing; and its interpretation. It is this latter component that is notoriously omitted in the conversation on big data. more at http://www.hitconsultant.net/2013/12/10/is-mhealth-data-moving-towards-big-data

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