Some 9,000 iPhone health applications are already offered by Apple's AppStore and the number is expected to continue rising further in coming months, according to a report published by MobiHealthNews.
The report, which is based on an analysis of Apple's AppStore, further indicates that by next summer the number of iPhone health applications will rise by 44 percent to some 13,000 apps.
The report shows that the average price of a paid health app is gradually rising as the average price for a paid health application rose to $3.21 on July 2011 from $2.77 in February.
Another report, published earlier this month by research company Technavio, predicts that the global mobile health applications market will reach $4.1 billion by 2014 compared to $1.7 billion in 2010.
"The number of health apps for consumers has grown at a steady, linear rate over the past 18 months," MobileHealthNews researchers wrote. "We expect it to continue on this track unless the regulatory environment changes drastically and scares off would-be developers from creating useful health apps for consumers"
The MobiHealthNews report indicates that the largest group of consumer health apps in the AppStore are cardio fitness apps, which account to 16.36% of all iPhone mHealth apps. The majority of these apps are running apps, which have attracted millions of users in the past year.
Diet related apps account to 14.15%, ahead of stress and relaxation apps (11.4%) and women's health apps (7.27%).
The authors note that while Apple’s health, fitness and medical categories claim to offer thousands more apps, many of these can't be seriously considered as mHealth related.
Aerotel Medical Systems has launched a new personal safety service in New Zealand and Australia in partnership with Elemental Technologies, a leading Australasian provider of solutions for personal safety, aged care and healthcare.
Elemental Technologies will offer a new 24 hours by 7 days a week service, based on Aerotel’s highly successful GeoSKeeper personal safety and location system. The service will enable finding the accurate location and providing immediate assistance to elderly persons or people with dementia, offering users and family members safety and peace of mind. In addition, GeoSkeeper will be distributed in New Zealand and Australia by Elemental Technologies.
"We have formed a partnership with Elemental Technologies to bring our personal safety solutions to the Australia and New Zealand markets,” said Ofer Atzmon, Vice President for Business Development and Marketing at Aerotel. “This agreement is another step in our global market expansion."
“After conducting a comprehensive search, we have found GeoSKeeper to be the most sophisticated and well established personal safety device on the market,” said Patrick Rogers, CEO and Co-founder at Elemental Technologies. “The combination of mobile phone and GPS technologies grants freedom to the wearer to travel away from home or work and confidence to their caregivers that they can be located and communicated with, anytime and anywhere.”
The global mobile health applications market is expected to reach $4.1 billion by 2014 compared to $1.7 billion in 2010, according to a report published by research company Technavio.
The company's analysts said they expect the market to grow by an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24% percent until 2014.
The report indicates that the key drivers for growth are the increase in general diseases and population of patients. It adds that the main source of revenue in this field will comes from smartphones used by the healthcare professionals.
Technavio estimates that the United States has the largest market share and is expected to grow at a faster rate in the future. The authors said that in the coming years, due to increasing focus on patients in developing nations, mobile Health software providers and telecom companies may penetrate further in countries such as China and India.
The analysts noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) intends to come up with proper rules for the approval of mobile health applications. This will, in turn, increase the productivity and the accuracy of these apps in the future.
At the same time, the analysts warned that there have not been proper or effective FDA rules and regulations yet. "FDA regulations seem to be more confusing than helpful to many vendors in the mHealth industry," Technavio wrote. "With the advent of numerous new Mobile Health applications being introduced in the market by various players, the FDA is finding it difficult to come up with any specific parameters for the Mobile Health applications".
