From conference and summit features to global health technology innovations: here’s what the news had to report on mHealth this week.

mHealth Alliance

• “Barcelona’s GSMA to spotlight mHealth technologies,” Yahoo Philippines, February 24.
  The Mobile World Congress will feature a mobile health conference to discuss the emergence of remote monitoring, wellness, and assisted living technologies, and their role in transforming the healthcare industry around the globe.  To learn more about the mobile health sessions, click here.

 

• “HIMSS takes over the mHealth Summit,” Government Health IT, February 21.
  Last year, HIMSS became an organizing partner of the mHealth Summit, and they now own the event.  This year’s summit will take place Dec. 3-5 at the Gaylord, located just outside of Washington, DC. The theme will be “Connecting the Mobile Health Ecosystem.”

 

• “Kenya’s Startup Boom,” Technology Review, March/April.
  Local programmers and homegrown business models are helping to realize the vast promise of using phones to improve health care and save lives.

 

e/mHealth

• “eHealth Africa Conference – Integrating mHealth into eHealth Strategy Implementation,” All Africa, February 23, 2012.
  This multi-stakeholder conference will take place in Nairobi, Kenya on the 18th and 19th of April 2012. The conference will identify best practices and lessons learned from previous experiences of developing national eHealth strategies and will also focus on integrating mHealth into eHealth strategy implementation. Click hereto learn more about the conference.

 

• “Mobile technology boost health care,” Gant Daily, February 23.
  Recent mobile phone initiatives in Bangladesh are allowing patients to reach a health worker for advice at no cost 24 hours a day, receive prenatal care reminders and even send complaints about patient care.

 

• “Monitoring Your Health With Mobile Devices,” New York Times, February 22.
  Dr. Eric Topol says that the smartphone will be a sensor that will help people take better control of their health by tracking it with increasing precision.  He is already seeing signs of this as companies find ways to hook medical devices to the computing power of smartphones. Devices to measure blood pressure, monitor blood sugar, hear heartbeats and chart heart activity are already in the hands of patients.

 

• “Africa to generate $1.2b revenue from mHealth by 2017 – GSMA Report,” Ghana Business News, February 20.
  The mobile health market’s worth is predicted to reach $23 billion in terms of revenue by 2017, according to a new report.  In terms of the market opportunity, the research found that the provision of pervasive mHealth services and applications worldwide could provide mobile operators with revenues worth approximately $11.5 billion by 2017 while “device vendors could benefit from a revenue opportunity of $6.6 billion, content and application providers $2.6 billion, and healthcare providers $2.4 billion by 2017.”

 

• “mHealth Innovation and Developers Challenges,” Department of Health and Human Services, February 17.
  Last July, HHS CTO Todd Park announced the availability of the HHS Challenge Toolkitand highlighted the department’s use of Developer Challenges as a tool to engage technology innovators to build creative and useful health solutions. The toolkit itself provides guidance, examples, and best practices for creating and running a challenge. Having participated in the design and judging of mHealth challenges/competitions, the author of this article, Audie Atienza, offers some reflections on his experiences.