By Chris Crockford

I moved into the world of mobile health for a reason. I got involved in heart monitoring because by October this year estimates say there will be 7 billion people on the planet, every single one of whom has a heart, and one day they are all going to stop. Given no one wants that to happen, this should be a highly motivated market sector.

Being able to monitor the human heart’s performance might just empower people to understand and work with it a little better. Small changes today could have a tangible impact later in life. Better understanding of the heart’s performance, coupled with small alterations to lifestyle, facilitated, and documented by easy-to-use home monitoring, might just extend the endurance and performance of your personal engine.

If people could check their heart’s rhythm performance against their heart’s performance history every time they visited the doctor and then have a reading taken every year, they might be able to watch an improvement, or deterioration, in its functional performance.

By 2012 the global penetration rate of mobile phones is predicted to be 64.7 percent of the 7 billion plus population, and estimates for this year suggest that 14 percent of smartphone users will already be using mobile health apps. Last year Juniper Research put the size of the remote patient monitoring market revenue at US$1.9 billion by 2014.

So if we can enable health monitoring on smartphones, at home or in the physician’s office, can we empower users globally to better understand their metrics? That would depend on several factors such as reactive or proactive healthcare systems, the health of the patient population, and above all the ability of the medical industries, the clinicians and the patients to accept change and the new technologies.

Most people in the developed world are reactive about their healthcare rather than proactive. They only see the doctor when something is wrong, so whilst in surgery monitoring is possible, can we expect to build business models from people checking their hearts performance at home when they feel perfectly healthy?  

Asking healthy people to test themselves using mobile devices is going to be a tall order, unless they are either heavily into their fitness, are financially incentivised, or the cost of service is made a micro payment that a percentage of the population will utilise. The place therefore for mobile health in this situation is in the physician’s office, providing we can persuade the physician to accept the technology.

With regards to people with long term conditions in older healthcare systems, we can now see how a mobile monitoring system is going to work. By allowing people to test themselves regularly we can empower them to manage their conditions more successfully. But can we build a business model around providing such a monitoring service? The place for mobile health technology in the long-term condition market is definitely in the community, providing we can find the right business model, and we can persuade the physicians and the authorities to adopt the technology.

Generally people fear change, and their ability to cling on to the past systems prevents them from realising the potential of such future systems. Enter the emerging economies. These are the markets who are actively looking to procure the best-in-class systems, that can cherrypick the mobile health systems that the world has to offer and bring them together to provide a technologically up to date health system that can empower both the clinician and the patient to use the latest technologies often at huge cost savings compared to their established counterparts. After all let’s not forget that after 63 years the UK NHS still has no central department for innovation procurement.

It is the emerging economies whom I believe will capitalise on the promise of mobile health. With higher expectations, lower dependency on legacy systems, and a greater appetite to procure today’s technology, these health economies might just lead the way.

Chris Crockford is the founder of Formula Innovation, a thinktank specializing in corporate innovation thinking, and Cardiocity, a UK based SME which specializes in heart monitoring and medical device design. Previously, he was the business development director for the McLaren Formula One motor racing team. While at McLaren he pioneered the Open Innovation process and led a medical telemetry programme that applied innovative thinking from the world of Formula One to medical care for human beings. Chris presented at the GSMA’s inaugural Mobile Health Summit which took place in Cape Town in June of this year. His presentation can be seen here.

The editorial views expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and will not necessarily reflect the views of the GSMA, its Members or Associate Members