Mobile Health

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To date, evidence-driven analytics on healthcare have relied on traditional healthcare data—mainly the electronic medical records discussed above. In the clinical setting, there are hopeful trends towards bringing new data to bear. For example, Tele-Language enables a human clinician to conduct language therapy sessions with multiple patients simultaneously with the aid of an AI agent trained by the clinician. And Lifegraph, which extracts behavioral patterns and creates alerts from data passively collected from a patient’s smartphone, has been adopted by psychiatrists in Israel to detect early signs of distressful behavior in patients.

Looking ahead, driven by the mobile computing revolution, the astonishing growth of “biometrics in the wild”—and the explosion of platforms and applications that use them—is a hopeful and unanticipated trend. Thousands of mobile apps now offer information, introduce behavior modification, or identify groups of “people like me.” This, combined with the emerging trend of more specialized motion tracking devices, such as Fitbit, and the emerging (inter)connectedness between the home environment and health-monitoring devices, has created a vibrant new sector of innovation.

By combining social and healthcare data, some healthcare apps can perform data mining, learning, and prediction from captured data, though their predictions are relatively rudimentary. The convergence of data and functionality across applications will likely spur new and even obvious products, such as an exercise app that not only proposes a schedule for exercise but also suggests the best time to do it, and provides coaching to stick to that schedule.