An increasing number of developed and developing nations are relying on mobile technology to fulfill health requirements. Thus, mHealth industry is highly dynamic. Furthermore, the line of applications being developed shows its demand is expanding. The major applications for the mobile health worldwide are remote monitoring, creating awareness, education, remote data accumulation, training and communication for healthcare officials, tracking epidemic and disease outbreak and treatment assistance. As per a recent survey by Makovsky/Kelton titled “Pulse of Online Health” close to 47 percent revealed that they would use mHealth apps to not only to prevent but also manage diseases by keeping a track of their dietary intake.
M-Health Applications Becomes a Major Source of Education & Awareness Programs
Mobile health applications have been highly popularized by teens residing in western nations and developing countries like Japan. The demand for low – cost medium of communicating with peers and friends and SMS, that acts as a scalable method of offering outreach services has kept the future of the sector bright. Apart from this, in awareness as well as education programs, SMSs can be delivered to end-users’ phone informing them about different testing methods, disease tracking and health services made available for the people.
Such applications offer the benefit of being highly unobtrusive, providing the end-users confidentiality in conditions where diseases are often considered a taboo, e.g. HIV. Alerts by such applications prove effective especially in targeting difficult – to-find rural areas, where lack of trained healthcare professionals and absence of clinics is a big problem. Eight applications that have revolutionized healthcare in developing nations are GiftedMom, Zero Mothers Die, maymay, Safe Delivery, MAMA and Mobile Midwife among others.
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M-Health Applications Strengthens Remote Data Accumulation
Data accumulation is a crucial element, when it comes to public health initiatives. Several health officials and policymaker are expected to offer relevant information at the community, district as well as national level. This further assists the government bodies to assess the effectiveness of the current regulations and initiatives and to define the new ones. In many developing nations accumulating field data is critical since different segments of people rarely have an access to better medical facilities, even in case of severe conditions. Collecting information where such patients dwell becomes important and should be continuously updated. Moreover, such information should be made available on a real – time basis. The information accumulation procedure is highly efficient and dependable, when conducted through mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs.
Eyeing the major developments in the sector, Big Market Research has added a report titled “M-Health Applications - Global Market Outlook (2015-2022).” As per the study the M-Health market is likely to generate about $103.23 bn by 2020. In addition, the sector is expected to register a CAGR of 32.5 percent between 2015 to 2022. Stakeholder looking for relevant information on the industry by trends, device, services, application and geography would find the research valuable. Some of the prominent vendors assessed during the study include Athenahealth, Inc., Biotelemetry, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., AirStrip Technologies, Inc. and LifeWatch AG among others.