Health applications for mobile and wearable devices have grown in both the commercial and research sectors, however, their application in the clinical sector has more room for improvement and growth.
Mobile devices have revolutionized the technology industry, yet their impact on healthcare has not shown their full potential. In the article "Mobile Health: making the leap to research and clinics," by Joy P. Ku and Ilda Sim, published in Nature, the authors highlight issues on how to successfully address translational barriers to make mobile health technologies useful in clinical research and medical care.
Currently, there are at least 85,000 health applications for cell phones and other portable devices. However, the recent breakthrough in mobile health (mHeatlh) has been through the combination of mobile apps with sensors that measure biomarkers on a continuous basis. Personalized data collection is one of the most important edges in mobile health.
“Data collection is only the first step in developing mHealth solutions that improve health outcomes. Clinicians and other stakeholders need to be convinced of the benefits of mHealth, and to-date it has been challenging to draw clear conclusions about the efficacy of these solutions, given the conflicting outcomes and heterogeneity in the implementation of mHealth interventions,” the authors explained.
Mobile Health Outreach
In the United States, the National Institutes of Health, has implemented centers specializing in big data, which includes focus related to accelerating the use of collected data through mobile devices.
“Coming out of a multi-disciplinary workshop called mHealth Connect, three articles in this issue explicate some of these factors and provide guidance on how to successfully address translational barriers for different use cases. Specifically, the articles describe considerations when selecting a suitable wearable sensor for a given application; analyzing observational health behavior data generated by mHealth apps and devices; and integrating these technologies into the clinical environment,” the authors explained.
Mobile Health Implementation
The authors raise the following questions surrounding the use of mobile health within clinical care: Is the mobile technology to be used by people with or without their clinicians? Is the intent to deploy locally in one care setting or to scale to global use?
Read the full article at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-021-00454-z
