Mobile Health Revolution - Lifestyle Change

We have made long strides in reducing mortality associated with cardiovascular diseases in the last 30 years. As a biomedical engineers, I would proudly attribute the success to ICD, cardiac pacemaker, and many other interventional procedures and new drugs that save lives. Once a while, there is an inconvenient argument that suggests the successful campaign on anti-tobacco use may have played as an important role as all of advances in medical technologies. That will be a difficult debate without a lot of data for cause-effect, but there is no debate that lifestyle is the most important factor that influences lifelong health.

In today’s calling to reduce overall healthcare cost, innovations that improve our lifestyle is also the biggest opportunity for mobile health solutions.

First to share a personal anecdote. I started to record daily weight about 10 years ago. After enough entries, I began to plot them, and monitored the trend more closely. To my disappointment, the weight did not drop. However, the standard deviation, or the day-to-day change, reduced overtime. The frequent monitoring provides a feedback to adjust diet, and remind me not to have that second piece of apple pie.

I see a good mobile health solution here. The App I am using today (‘My Weight HD’ or the FitBit system) provides some but an incomplete solution. I like to have a weight scale that sends data wirelessly to my cellphone after each weight. I need an App that provides simple tools to annotate, analyze and trend. This is a solution I would happily pay now, because I know it will help me keep a healthy weight, and avoid paying a lot more in the future in care for high blood pressure, diabetes, or sleep apnea. In the last 10 years, I did not lose any weight, but thanks to that little excel sheet, I did not gain any weight either.

The revolution in mobile health is in its solutions to empower healthcare consumer to be more knowledgeable about our own health, and provide tools for us to manage our own health. It is that one apple a day that keeps doctors away, one of the most effective way to reduce healthcare cost.