Developing Healthcare Apps for Nokia Asha (5Dec 4pmUTC)

This webinar has presented, from my point of view, one of the most promising fields of mobile apps
development. The healthcare apps are becoming a very successful tool that enables access to health surveillance and medical tracking for individuals that are physically distant from the doctor's office. However through the mobile device it becomes easy to receive medical service.

Also considering the current increment in healthcare cost, the perspective shows that using of mobile devices as a healthcare provider extension is a mean that could reduce the costs. It also could provide a home healthcare that could be personalized and most accurate that the current main stream medical system generalized templates for everyone.

The roles in this scenario are:
- Doctors that wants to support professional activities using technology that enable them to provide distant medical service.
- Patients that wants cutting edge means for receive better and cost effective treatment.
- Healthy people that wants to stay healthy for years.

The current M-Health market apps belongs to the following types:
- Informational/tutorial: this kind of apps provide information about how to keep you healthy.
- Doctor assistants. Provide suggestion according to the received queries in order to minimize the search effort and maximize the doctor's decision making.
- Vital signs/ medication trackers: This kind of apps make measurements of vital signs like hearth beat and provide medication management through tracking of the schedule and medicine dosage.
- Mobile diagnostics: It works as a mean of contact with the doctor that enables the patient to get in touch and a tele-diagnosis can be provided.

Some existing apps from Nokia Asha are:

- StepCounter published by Psiirtola is a step counter for the Asha phones platform.  It is a little application that counts your daily steps. In addition, it shows the result from yesterday and all time high. This pedometer is based on accelerometers and does not use mobile data connection. Works also when the screen is off.

- PGA Blood Sugar Converter published by NMA Runs on touch enabled Java Mobiles. It has been optimized for the Asha mobile devices, including Asha 501. This app converts the blood sugar level from mg/dL to mmoL. It displays a danger level gauge to indicate level of danger for particular blood sugar level. It is a very useful app for nurses and doctors.

- Blood Pressure Diary published by E-WeREST MD it is a blood pressure tracking and analysis tool that works with blood pressure measurement records. It provides statistics of these measurements and enable us to classify them. This project is currently supported by Open Innovations Association FRUCT from Russia and Finland.

Another important characteristic of this kind of apps is the connectivity with medical devices and sensors as the blood pressure monitor. It opens a wide field of possibilities also considering the current boom of open hardware gadgets based on arduino and other hardware platforms. One example of such a connectivity is provided at the Nokia developer wiki (here).

Reference:
Webinar presentation.