US healthcare provider UnitedHealth Group has announced strategic partnerships with three firms that specialise in mobile health.  UnitedHealth has formed alliances with Carespeak Communications, Lose it! and Fitbit. All three have in common the aim of simplifying the consumer healthcare experience by making information more readily available on smartphones and other mobile devices.  Also they are all US firms.

Carespeak has developed an application that enables patients to manage their health using SMS. It is sufficiently versatile to be useable by individual patients, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers or clinicians. Patients report via SMS how much medication they take as well as biometric data. They also receive educational and motivational messages to support their treatment. Lose it! Is a mobile app developed by FitNow which is focused on weight loss and those trying to attain it. It offers support as well as tracking users’ progress with their programme.

The third firm is Fitbit and is the only one which is a device vendor rather than a service provider. Fitbit’s wireless tracker (pictured) tracks users’ physical activity. The device includes an accelerometer so that it can more accurately measure users’ steps and an altimeter for tracking the number of steps climbed. In addition to physical activity, the tracker also follows a user’s sleep patterns. Fitbit will be integrated with the mobile health app developed by Optum, a health services company owned by UnitedHealth.