... The study reviewed 34 SMS applications (excluding those not launched in developing markets or that focused on disease prevention) but only five had made available evaluation study findings.
The researchers stated that most of the applications they reviewed were pilot projects “in various levels of sophistication” with “modes of intervention varying between one-way or two-way communication, with or without incentives, and with educative games.”
Of those five SMS applications that did have evaluation findings available, the researchers said that the “primary barriers identified were language, timing of messages, mobile network fluctuations, lack of financial incentives, data privacy, and mobile phone turnover.”
Efficacy studies for all mobile health services — not just those for developing markets — is shaping up to be one of the big trends of 2012.
The "Nuvola It Home Doctor" system developed by Telecom Italia is enabling chronic patients who are being treated at the Molinette Hospital in Turin to monitor their physiological parameters via mobile phone from their own homes. Cellular News reports.
Following a joint trial, the service is now available to chronic patients under treatment in the Molinette Hospital Geriatric Unit and the Molinette Home Hospital Unit and will be gradually rolled out to the cardiology, pneumology, neurology, haematology units and some areas of internal medicine.
... Telecom Italian expects that the service will be taken up by other hospitals in the region to monitor as many as 5,000 patients from their own homes.
An interesting take on the health studies surrounding cell phones. By The Washington Times.
To evaluate the possible health effects of cell phone radiation, as with any other environmental hazard, scientists must consider different types of scientific evidence, including animal toxicology studies.
n sensu stricto animal toxicology studies, animals are exposed to a large overdose of tested chemical or radiation, beyond the levels normally encountered by human beings in real situations, and examined for any detrimental health effects. In another type of toxicology studies, animals are exposed to the potential hazard for their life-time and examined for the impact of the hazard on their health and on the health and development of the offspring.
However, in case of the studies of cell phone radiation, there is a limitation that precludes the use of toxicology to the fullest.
It is impossible to perform toxicology studies exposing animals to large overdoses of cell phone radiation. Large overdoses of cell phone radiation (microwaves) will heat animals, impacting animal health. Moreover, it is impossible to transfer this information to humans, because current cell phone safety standards are set at levels that do not cause heating.
What is the value of animal studies showing no effect for the human health risk analysis? It is very minimal, at the best. Certainly it is not proof of human safety.
The incidence of glioma - the most common form of brain tumour - is not increasing in the Nordic countries, contradicting the claim that mobile phone use is a cause of the disease. This according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in the scientific journal Epidemiology. Press release via Medical Express reports.
The analyses presented by the researchers also show that the increased risks previously reported to be associated with mobile telephony in a few individual studies should have been observable in the general cancer statistics if mobile phone use had indeed been associated with a true risk increase.
In Kenya, the ratio of patients to doctors is 6,000 to 1, and the dearth of health professionals isn't the only challenge to accessing decent health care. Unlicensed impostors hand out expired medicines to people who don't know any better, and a shortage of public information on health services makes it easier for quacks to lure victims. Good.is reports via @mobileactive
... More than 25 million Kenyans have mobile phones, making apps a logical way to disseminate essential information about health. MedAfrica, a new smartphone app, has positioned itself as the go-to service for wired Kenyans in search of reputable health care. The app operates like a mobile yellow pages for medical services, providing basic listings of professionals in the area. Additional features include a symptom checker for patients to compare their ailments with different diseases and make decisions about seeking medical attention.
Smartphones and tablets are transforming the future of health care. Can we really trust them to save lives? FastCompany reports via @jranck.
... "mHealth," the rapidly growing business of using mobile technology in health care. Leveraging the wonders of a device that's fast becoming ubiquitous--two in three people worldwide own a cell phone--a new generation of startups is building apps and add-ons that make your handheld work like high-end medical equipment. Except it's cheaper, sleeker, and a lot more versatile.
"It's like the human body has developed a new organ," says Raja Rajamannar, chief innovation officer at Humana. Smartphones can already track calories burned and miles run, and measure sleep patterns. By 2013, they'll be detecting erratic heartbeats, monitoring tremors from Parkinson's disease, and even alerting you when it's prime time to make a baby.
At stake is the future of health care--and a share of the $273 billion medical-device industry, which is dominated by the likes of GE and Philips. Although today's mHealth market barely tops $2 billion, experts predict that number will skyrocket over the next decade as smartphones get smarter and patients lose, well, patience with the high costs and hassles of health care.
In 2009, researchers at MIT gave a dorm full of students smartphones and tracked where they went, who they called and texted, and at what times they communicated. The researchers found that the data pouring out of the phones could reliably tell when a student was ill: Those stricken with the flu moved around much less, and those who were depressed had fewer calls and interactions with others. Business Week reports via @jranck.
Anmol Madan, the PhD student who led the study, concluded that the findings might be useful outside of dorms. There are now more than 60 million smartphones in the U.S., and they’re “incredibly powerful diaries of a person’s life,” he says. So in November 2010, Madan and his classmate Karan Singh, both 29, started Ginger.io to mine those diaries and provide the kind of detailed, persistent health monitoring that doctors and researchers have only dreamed of. “There hasn’t been large-scale, real-world data about how people behave” before now, he says.
A cellphone can provide a crucial safety net for teenagers who are homeless, according to a new study published in the Journal of Urban Health.
"Cell Phone Use Among Homeless Youth: Potential for New Health Interventions and Research," was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.
Because cellphones are nearly ubiquitous among American adolescents, the study said, this technology can give family, friends and providers new ways to keep connected to homeless youth, a population that is highly transient.
Unlike adults who are homeless, teenagers have fewer mental-health and substance-abuse problems that can stop them from getting off the streets.
A leading researcher says digital technologies are about to make health care more effective. But is so much data really beneficial? MIT Technology Review via @jranck.
Nanosensors patrolling your bloodstream for the first sign of an imminent stroke or heart attack, releasing anticlotting or anti-inflammatory drugs to stop it in its tracks. Cell phones that display your vital signs and take ultrasound images of your heart or abdomen. Genetic scans of malignant cells that match your cancer to the most effective treatment.
In cardiologist Eric Topol's vision, medicine is on the verge of an overhaul akin to the one that digital technology has brought to everything from how we communicate to how we locate a pizza parlor. Until now, he writes in his upcoming book The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care, the "ossified" and "sclerotic" nature of medicine has left health "largely unaffected, insulated, and almost compartmentalized from [the] digital revolution." But that, he argues, is about to change.
Mobile health platforms are fast emerging in Kenya, where one startup's newly launched mobile health platform is attracting nearly 1,000 downloads daily, and the dominant telecom, Safaricom, has forged a partnership that will give its 18 million subscribers access to doctors. MIT Technology Review reports via @jranck.
.. Many Kenyans have serious health problems; for example, according to the World Health Organization, more than 30 percent of children under age five show stunted growth. At present, only 7,000 doctors serve a nation of 40 million people. But Kenya is rich in mobile phones, with 25 million subscribers (Africa has more than 600 million of them).
The new app, called MedAfrica—available for smart phones and less powerful feature phones—is the product of Shimba Technologies, a Nairobi-based company founded by two locally educated entrepreneurs, Stephen Kyalo and Kezia Muoki, with $100,000 in seed money from a European VC.
MedAfrica is platform that provides a suite of health services (health widgets) such as symptom checkers, first-aid information, doctor & hospital directories as well as relevant alert services.
Text-messaging might be an effective way for health care providers to help young adults reduce heavy drinking, according to a study funded by a research grant by the Emergency Medicine Foundation. The findings will be published in the March 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research and are now available online.
When we used text-messaging to collect drinking data and to offer immediate feedback and support to young adults discharged from the emergency department, they drank less," said lead study author Brian Suffoletto, M.D., M.S., assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh in Pa.
"Each day in the U.S., more than 50,000 adults ages 18 to 24 visit hospital emergency departments and more than a third of them report current alcohol abuse or dependence. If not addressed, hazardous or binge drinking can lead to high rates of avoidable injuries and death.
Dariusz Leszczynski for Communities @Washington Times reports on how safe are cell phones, what we know and what we don't know.
A total of only 831 studies (as of Dec. 3, 2011) has been performed using cell phone radiation. This is a very small number, considering that different research groups used different experimental models and a broad variety of exposure hardware and exposure conditions. This in turn makes the comparison of the results very difficult or nearly impossible to draw any reliable health risk conclusions.
... We hear disputes about human health risk and the claims of its absence where we do not have studies examining effects of cell phone radiation on humans at the molecular level where any effects would start. That is a big reason for doing more research.
Handheld gadgets could one day diagnose infections at the push of a button by using the supersensitive touchscreens in today's smartphones. New Scientist reports.
Many believe that in the future collecting samples of saliva, urine or blood could be performed using a cheap, USB-stick-sized throwaway device called a lab-on-a-chip. The user would inject a droplet of the fluid in the chip, and micropumps inside it would send the fluid to internal vessels containing reagents that extract target disease biomarker molecules. The whole device would then be sent to a lab for analysis.
But Hyun Gyu Park and Byoung Yeon Won at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology in Daejeon think touchscreens could improve the process by letting your phone replace the lab work. Park suggests the lab-on-a-chip could present a tiny droplet of the sample to be pressed against a phone's touchscreen for analysis, where an app would work out whether you have food poisoning, strep throat or flu, for example.
A Swedish man who sometimes wears a silver-coloured suit to protect himself from mobile phone mast radiation had demanded that local officials in Dalarna in central Sweden create a “radiation-free zone” to protect his health that may leave half the county without mobile phone coverage.
Forbes reports on how psychiatrists are integrated texting in their practices.
Some psychiatrists, like Dr. Alan Manevitz, at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, encourages his patients to text message what’s happening in their lives in real time.
Once upon a time, Manevitz says, people came to their psychiatrists to lie on the couch and free-associate, ratting off whatever was on their mind. Now, texts let us do this from the field. “Texts allow us to capture people’s voices in the situations they’re in, right when they’re in them. Then when they come in to the office, we talk about what’s happened, but I’m already aware of it through their texts in the preceding week. The events are captured instantaneously. This is not from memory (which can pose accuracy problems), it’s in real time.”
Texts also allow patients to be more comfortable opening up about their experiences than they tend to be in person. They’re more willing to reveal the thoughts they’ve had, says Manevitz, or the choices they’ve made, which is particularly true for teens who are experimenting with new activities and substances that they might be ashamed to reveal on the couch.
The service is called 'Daktari1525' and will enable Safaricom's subscriber base of over 18 million to call doctors at any time of the day and receive expert advice on health issues.
Dialling 1525 will connect the user to the Safaricom call centre, and a doctor will be on hand to assist. The service will be charged at KES 20 a minute and is expected drastically to reduce hospital visits and medical expenditure.
Ginger.io just won the $100,000 Data Design Diabetes challenge, because it silently analyzes your phone usage data to figure out if you’re upset. For diabetes patients, that could be a lifesaver. FastCompany reports via @JodyRanck.
Your smartphone is an incredibly powerful tool—one that we mostly waste by just using to make phone calls and check email. But it’s really an advanced bundle of sensors that is with us nearly 24 hours a day, collecting massive amounts of data. Doctors and health professionals are only now starting to understand the opportunity this data can provide. Take a new app that helps silently identify diabetes patients who might be slipping with their treatments.
The Los Angeles Times on a new medical identification bracelet that came on the market Tuesday, that uses text messaging to convey detailed medical information to first responders.
With the TextID bracelets, information can be accessed within seconds of an emergency responder sending a text to the five-digit number on the ID. That information is texted back in two parts – a first message that reveals the patient’s name, gender, age, condition and contact phone number, and a second message with a URL providing an entire medical profile. In a personal test of the system, both texts were received within 10 seconds.
The ruling, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, called for San Francisco to tone down its message and to remove the requirement for retailers to post warnings on their walls.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup said the warnings created an "untrue and misleading" perception that cell phones are dangerous and "somehow escaped the regulatory process." He added that the rule overstates the risks posed by cell phones.
In early September, 29 community health workers began using Nokia cell phones as the latest tool in the fight against cholera. The specially programmed phones help track information about cholera patients in isolated communities throughout Haiti’s Central Plateau – an important step in gathering the up-to-date infection data that could prevent more deaths.
Most physicians use text messaging to exchange patient information with other health care providers, but such communication could be a violation of federal privacy and security rules, experts said during a webinar this week.
Another day, another study. Researchers follow whole Danish population aged over 30 and find incidence of brain cancer in mobile users is no higher. The Guardian reports.
There is no link between the long-term use of a mobile phone and brain cancer, research suggests.
In what has been described as the largest study on the subject, researchers found that cancer rates in the central nervous system were almost the same in both long-term mobile phone users and people who do not use the handsets, the study published on BMJ.com found.
Just over a quarter (26%) of U.S. adults have used their mobile phones for health information or tools in the past 12 months, according to a survey by Manhattan Research. The mobile health population has more than doubled since 2010, when 12 percent of consumers conducted health activities on their mobile phones. Cellular News reports.
Information-gathering, whether by searching for health information or consuming health news, remains the most common mobile health behavior.
However, there has been an increase in consumers using their mobile phones to manage their care or treatment in the past year. For example, 3 percent of consumers used prescription drug refill or reminder services on their mobile phones in 2010, while 8 percent did so in 2011.
Here's a shocker: The Guardian reports that 16% of UK mobile phones are contaminated with faecal bacteria due to poor personal hygiene.
Researchers said that 16% of the devices were contaminated with E coli, which can cause food poisoning, most probably because people fail to properly wash their hands after going to the toilet. The study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Queen Mary, University of London, also found that Britons tend to lie about their personal hygiene.
Though rare in the Western world, fistula affects more than 2.5 million young women and is a debilitating condition that causes millions of stillbirths across Africa. JustMeans reports.
Some of the reasons are women are not aware that they can be cured and crucially can't afford the bus fare to hospital to get treatment.
It is this travel cost problem that was noticed by Vodacom, Tanzani'as biggest mobile phone network. Last year it started to make a difference by using its mobile phone money transfer social innovation service, M-Pesa to text-message the bus fare to women who are affected.
A survey reported by AsiaOne Health, claims nearly two-thirds of Taiwan's sixth-graders are myopic, and so are more than one-fifth of the first graders.
Prolonged gazing at objects up close, such as smart phone displays and tablet computers, strains the eyes, especially those of growing children, Fu Chou-ching, ophthalmologist and ORBIS Taiwan volunteer, said yesterday.
Some 2- to 3-year-olds already have learned to surf the Web and play their parents' mobile games, Fu said, adding that these children's eyesight could be impaired as time goes on.
Scientists are developing healthcare-related smartphone apps that could actually save lives. The new apps are designed to help doctors by integrating with medical devices, enabling the smartphone to become the tool for data handling, analytics, visualization and communication. Tibco reports.
The prototype device lets doctors extract small amounts of cells from a mass inside of a patient, analyze the sample immediately, get the results in an hour, then give the results to other doctors as well as quickly put the information into the patient’s medical records rapidly. And the device only costs $200.
Although the microNMR is a great device in its own right, when it’s connected to a smartphone it also solves another screening dilemma: rapid and accurate analysis, which means doctors can extract cells from the patient and analyze them immediately instead of sending them out to be tested.
Dr. Ashifi Gogo is the CEO of Sproxil, a company that uses cell phones to protect against counterfeit drugs. He is interviewed on CNN.
...Up to 50 percent of some medicines in specific developing countries, including Nigeria and Pakistan, are substandard. These substandard drugs, which do not have the correct potency, can lead to a significant healthcare crisis both in terms of number of deaths and in terms of spurring drug-resistant diseases.
With just a text message, Sproxil solves this problem.
We allow consumers to verify that the product they are buying is genuine by using a mobile phone and a simple, free text message. Other solutions like chemical tests are too expensive for consumers in emerging markets.
As with RFID tags, these other methods require prohibitively expensive setups. By contrast, Sproxil uses scratch card technology that has been common in developing nations for the last decade.
Consumers merely use a scratch-off panel on the medication to identify a unique PIN, text the PIN to Sproxil’s number and receive a response on the authenticity of the drug right on their cell phone.
-- Scratch codes aid malaria fight - New systems that let users dial up to verify antimalarial and other drugs' authenticity could be a major defense against counterfeit meds.
-- Mobile phones fight Africa's drug war - New systems that let users dial up to verify antimalarial and other drugs' authenticity could be a major defense against counterfeit meds.
-- Stop Stock-outs, an SMS program developed by Parson University students to track medicine inventories at the local level in many African villages.
-- Text messages across Nigeria are helping to track the distribution of some 63 million mosquito nets – the largest campaign of its kind to date.
-- A new solution developed by IBM, Novartis and Vodafone with the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, is helping to save lives using everyday technology to improve the availability of anti-malarial drugs in remote areas of Tanzania.
Autism has increased sixty-fold since the late 1970s. But autism rates really took off during the past 10 years. The scientific community is not really sure what causes autism. Is it genetic? Environmental? Do vaccines which contain mercury contribute? No one seems to know for sure.
So what is the implication of this? Well with no real understanding of what causes autism, scientists and doctors are at a loss for how to prevent it…and how to cure it. Now there is evidence that wireless devices…cell phones, WI-FI devices, cellular towers…all may be having an adverse effect.
Research conducted in Australia studied children with autism over a five year period. The study looked at the effect EMR or electromagnetic radiation has on kids. The study, published in the Journal of the Australian College of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine found a correlation to heavy metal concentrations, exposure to EMR and autism.
Cnet reports that an Italian study published in the Journal of Andrology (PDF) by researchers in the United States and around the world, have found that the radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation (RF-EMR) emitted by cell phones may decrease sperm count and damage sperm quality.
... The study reviewed 34 SMS applications (excluding those not launched in developing markets or that focused on disease prevention) but only five had made available evaluation study findings.
The "
An interesting take on the health studies surrounding cell phones. By 
The incidence of glioma - the most common form of brain tumour - is not increasing in the Nordic countries, contradicting the claim that mobile phone use is a cause of the disease. This according to a new study from 
In Kenya, the ratio of patients to doctors is 6,000 to 1, and the dearth of health professionals isn't the only challenge to accessing decent health care. Unlicensed impostors hand out expired medicines to people who don't know any better, and a shortage of public information on health services makes it easier for quacks to lure victims. Good.is reports via 
Smartphones and tablets are transforming the future of health care. Can we really trust them to save lives? 
A leading researcher says digital technologies are about to make health care more effective. But is so much data really beneficial? 
Mobile health platforms are fast emerging in Kenya, where one startup's newly launched mobile health platform is attracting nearly 1,000 downloads daily, and the dominant telecom, Safaricom, has forged a partnership that will give its 18 million subscribers access to doctors. 
San Francisco may have gone too far in 
Here's a shocker: 
A survey reported by 
Scientists are developing 
