Why would a person who is ill – even with a life-threatening condition – resist taking their medications? The answers are as varied as the millions who are hospitalized every year because they skip their meds or take incorrect dosages.
In the US alone, someone dies every 19 minutes because of medication non-adherence – reason enough for an app like MediSafe, said Omri Shor, who along with his brother Rotem developed the app after his father accidentally double-dosed on insulin and suffered an emergency. So valuable is MediSafe’s technology that the company in 2014 won Qualcomm’s fourth annual innovation QPrize, collecting a total of $250,000 in prizes.
HealthTap, which offers a mobile telemedecine and health information service, surveyed some 65,000 doctors in its network to find out which apps they were recommending to patients.
Although it hasn’t gone public yet, Israel-based public transport app maker Moovit’s valuation is, according analysts, well into IPO territory.
The company last week announced a new Series C funding round of $50 million – which, according to analysts, means that the company is worth as much as $450 million.
Among those investors were investment houses Keolis, Bernard Arnault Group and Vaizra; Nokia Growth Partners, the mobile tech company’s venture capital arm; and, perhaps curiously for a VC sponsored by a car company, BMW i Ventures is also part of the investment in an Israeli company that strives to be the Waze of public transportation.
Be My Eyes, a new Danish non-profit ‘startup’, has taken a commodity technology, the humble video call, and, by combining it with a community of sighted volunteers, used it as the basis for an iOS app that lets you help a visually-impaired person ‘see’ through their phone’s video camera.
The launch of Apple HealthKit and Google Fit in the latter half of 2014, along with the pending launch of the Apple Watch in the first quarter of this year, has the world of mobile health applications poised to truly go mainstream in 2015. The mHealth application market is estimated to be worth $6.4 billion in 2015, and more than double that in 2016 ($13.5 billion), up from $4 billion in 2014.
Researchers are working on a more convenient way to track your breathing while you sleep: by putting a microphone-equipped pair of earphones and a smartphone on your bedside table. The technology could make tracking sleep disorders easier than visiting a sleep lab.
Ideally, no one would use their smartphone while driving. Realistically, people do – often putting themselves, their passengers and others in danger. Drivemode, a new company emerging from stealth today and backed by $2 million in seed funding, has developed an Android app that lets you use your phone without actually looking at it.
The Drivemode app offers access to common phone functions like calls, messages, navigation, apps and music and utilizes a combination of voice narration to let you know where you are on the menu. In addition, it uses bright colors and big animations to let you see your phone screen using only your peripheral vision.
No question about it: The world wants mobile medical apps (MMAs)—and demand won’t slow down any time soon.
“The demand for remote patient monitoring is growing dramatically,” says Jeannette Tighe, from the HealthTech Advisory practice at Sagentia, a global technology advisory and product development company headquartered in Cambridge, U.K.
No question about it: The world wants mobile medical apps (MMAs)—and demand won’t slow down any time soon.
“The demand for remote patient monitoring is growing dramatically,” says Jeannette Tighe, from the HealthTech Advisory practice at Sagentia, a global technology advisory and product development company headquartered in Cambridge, U.K.
Born from the ashes of Nokia’s ‘Wellness’ initiative — part of Nokia Research Center, which, by some estimates, helped make the once mobile giant the third largest R&D spender in Europe as recently as 2011 — is Wellmo, another Finnish startup operating in the health and fitness space.
