Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Passive health apps – the next big thing - probably


The guy who was formerly in charge of “design and user experience” for Mozilla's Firefox, left the company last year to start Massive Health that will be launching a mobile health app later this year. Nothing strange in that.

From the article in Technology Review it would seem that venture is going to be offering something a bit special.  I quote from the article
Health apps have yet to reach the people who really need them. Most existing apps, such as those that track sleep or workouts, are what he calls "wellness" tools that attract people who already take a close interest in optimizing their health, rather than not-so-healthy people who must manage chronic diseases.
The founder of the company isn't ready to detail his own company's plan but he says he is taking on the challenge of helping just that population. The idea is to make health care a constant in people's lives, not something that occurs only during a check-up.
This all sounds very sensible to me. Sooner or later, somebody is going to initiate a mega-improvement in the interface between smart devices and health monitoring equipment and then to provide the recipient with proactive advice on what to do – rather than the app just being a smart collector of information.
I think this might be a company to watch. Dick Stroud

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