Immobility

This past week I got a handful of comments about a Wall Street Journal article titled "Your iPhone Just Called: Your Blood-Sugar Is High".  Pretty neat concept, but the article really doesn't talk about the future convergence of in home heath monitoring/diagnostic equipment with personal health information repositories, as the title might imply. 

Instead the article focuses on something much more accessible today - the use of mobile devises to view and even update personal health information.  One family cited in the article actually uses such an application to help in caring for aging parents.   The iPhone application in question is Polka.  Polka, like nearly all the applications mentioned in the article, uses a central web application to house the personal health record.  Polka is primarily and personal tool, but the "team" tools allow some sharing of information across a team or family in the case of senior health care. 

Most of the applications mentioned in the article, including Polka, have a strong bias toward disease management.  This is certainly an important issue in geriatric care.  Polka also has some more holistic tools including over all well-being.

For easy reference, here are the products mentioned in the article with hyperlinks to their web sites:

• Polka
• Asthma Journal by Ringful
• AllOne Mobile
• TheCarrot.com