Many of us know about various Bluetooth devices (e.g. headsets, etc.) that allow us to connect with technology wirelessly. Well now, Jawbone, one of the manufacturers of the headsets we know and love, has come up with a way to track our health statistics and patterns with similar technology.

Introducing the Up wristband.

Announced this morning, the wearable device is supposed to help track your activities (what you eat, sleep) as well as provide prompts to move and get active if you’re sitting at your desk for too long.

Design meets technology meets health.

I recently had the opportunity to head out to San Francisco to attend the Health 2.0 conference – I was pretty jazzed since this would be my third time out there since first attending as a volunteer in 2008. I think as the Health 2.0 field has matured over the past few years, there have been some pretty interesting initiatives and companies popping up. Being interested in covering this sort of innovation, I was pleased to see a company catch my interest – Health eVillages.

From what I initially gathered, the Health eVillages initiative works to integrate technology into healthcare systems around the globe. It looks like mobile is the main focus. The site’s landing page has a video to give you a glimpse into who is behind the program as well. Through press connections at the conference, I got a chance to catch up with Health eVillages’ co-founder and CEO of Physicians Interactive, Donato Tramuto – in order to get some thoughts on the history and inner workings.

P/S:  What prompted the creation of Health eVillages?

DT: I am a firm believer that healthcare is a right for every single individual on this earth. It’s not just the access to care that is so important but it’s the quality of care- every person deserves good, adequate healthcare. As CEO of Physicians Interactive, we strive to make healthcare more efficient and adequate through the use of mobile technology. A few years ago my sister-in-law died in childbirth due to a medical error so I’ve become very passionate in working to provide safer care– mobile information technology can significantly help make this possible. In an age where advancements in technology are surpassing all expectations, it is unimaginable that today there are areas in the world, including here in the U.S., where people continue to suffer and die due to a lack of access to sufficient healthcare. This is what prompted me to start Health eVillages- I wanted to make an impact.

About a year ago, I was fortunate enough to meet Kerry Kennedy through my involvement with her wonderful organization, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. She, along with her father, is a great hero of mine and her work has been inspirational. With her incredible commitment and passion to human rights and my expertise in the mobile medical technology field, we created Health eVillages to bring technology to areas where people often have no access to clean water, much less modern medical care.

P/S: How does education for community health workers/physicians take place regarding use of mobile phones?

DT: Because the clinics in most of the areas where these Health eVillages mobile medical devices are being implemented do not have the facilities to hold medical references or have the money to buy new editions and stay updated with the most current medical conditions, the mobile phones allow physicians to access information through the touch of a button. Doctors can easily find medical references, resources and solutions to a medical question or issue on their phone. These mobile devices are easy to use and is something that they can have on them at all times without having to go through medical books that they might not even have.

P/S:  Have the results from the pilot programs been received yet? If so, where can that information be found?

DT: To date, the organization has conducted pilot programs in several regions, including in Haiti, Uganda, the Greater Gulf Coast, and Lwala, Kenya. Because Health eVillages is new, we’re still in the process of collecting detailed feedback and data on the outcomes of these phones. We’ve worked with volunteer nurses at the Angels of Hope Clinic in Mattuga, Uganda, providing them with a number of mobile devices and mobile technical support in an area without basic electricity. Based on their successful use of the mobile technology, the organization has requested additional devices and applications as they begin their expansion into Northern Uganda.

P/S:  Is there a process to how Health eVillages receives the donated phones? Is that a process the general public can get involved with like Hope Phones?

DT: Unlike Hope Phones, Health eVillages only distributes smart phones which better support the Skyscape medical application. However, we are similar in that we are resourceful by distributing refurbished phones. Since we’re still in the early stage, we have not reached out to the general public for donated phones- it is definitely a possibility….

P/S:  What is the process for ensuring that the software loaded onto the phones are useful for each of the communities in the pilot programs? Is there a sort of co-creation/development process in order to maximize effectiveness?

DT: The new and refurbished mobile phones and handheld devices do not require Internet access and are preloaded with clinical decision support reference tools to ensure that caregivers and patients have access to updated medical references in remote locations around the world. All devices include drug guides, medical alerts, journal summaries and references from over 50 medical publisher resources powered by Skyscape.com, Inc. Health eVillages has had brainstorming sessions with healthcare workers during the pilot program to get feedback on the devices and how they could be improved to better fit the workers’ needs.

Big thanks to the Donato and the team over at Health eVillages for this look behind the scenes. I’m all about practical use of technology to change the infrastructure and processes for sustainable impact. Looking forward to following up when the initiative gets even more data on the pilot programs.

The following is a guest post from Douglas Naegele, President at Infield Health – a mobile health company based in Washington, DC.  Doug recounts his experience as an attendee at the two-day FDA event. You can follow Doug on Twitter as @textandshout

On September 12, 2011, the FDA hosted Day One of a two-day event about the proposed regulation of mobile medical apps.  Three hot-button issues emerged that affect everyone in healthcare.

Intended use:  There was a lot of discussion around how the FDA’s ‘Intended Use’ litmus test applies to the blurring boundaries of mobile vs. Web, care delivery vs. patient education, and doctors vs. patients.

For example, imagine an X-Ray image of a broken leg.  How does Intended Use (and the triggered regulations) address:

1. A Radiologist making a diagnosis,
2. A family doctor staying informed about his or her patient,
3. The patient wanting to see the image,
4. The boss of a local construction company where the patient works.

If the same iPhone / iPad app can show the same image to four different constituents, how should the FDA regulate that?  And what’s the cost to patients and lay people if over-regulation prevents them from participating in the process?

Public Health vs. Healthcare:  The participants voiced their opinions about how mobile devices blur the line between health education and chronic condition management – especially if a slightly different message is being delivered through the same technology channel.  For example, does the FDA require 510(k) for a program that texts tips to pre-diabetic mothers, but not for texting healthy mothers?

Enforcement Discretion:  FDA’s recent guidance to mobile app makers presented a three-tiered pyramid:

1. Top Tier:  Apps that connect to medical devices or those used to diagnose or treat medical conditions.  These require 510(k) approval.
2. Middle Tier:  Apps that influence healthcare in some way.  Think of an app that gives diabetics advice based on user-submitted glucose levels.  These fall under ‘Enforcement discretion’ and at this time don’t require advance approval.
3. Lower tier:  Apps that reflect general health and wellness, including disconnected data trackers.

Many points were made about designing apps for the middle tier, especially regarding the uncertainty of future FDA action and its influence on new entrants.  Can the proverbial “two guys in a garage” design an app and gain investor funding for its distribution if there is uncertainty about FDA regulation?  Is that uncertainty better than FDA issuing a blanket “We regulate ALL apps” policy?  Or is the marketplace a better regulator?  After all, apps that perform badly will be kicked aside by users.

There was one thing all the panelists and commenters agreed upon, and that was kudos to the FDA for reaching out to the technology community to solicit its opinions.

The following is a guest post from Jayme Hummer, associate at The Path of the Blue Eye Project, an innovative health marketing/communications initiative.

In 2009, we launched a very special initiative designed to aid collaboration and knowledge sharing/acquisition in health marketing communications called the Path of the Blue Eye Project.  Since then, we have been living the philosophy of the Project by producing a number of online and offline initiatives that have aided a diverse community of health communications experts, including public health communicators, social marketers, digital designers and others.

One of the most successful parts of the Project has been unNiched(micro), a series of breakfast events designed to provide health marketing communications pros with opportunities for deep learning and networking.  To date we have hosted two unNiched(micro) events focusing on mobile health and the health data movement (in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).

Our third unNiched(micro) event is designed to provide attendees with hands-on experience with some of the most imaginative and impactful innovations in health marketing communications today. And, we need your help.  We plan to feature between six and eight innovations in the areas of mobile, public health communications, design, media relations and other topics during the event.  Attendees will have the opportunity to test drive each innovation during the event, which will hopefully spark ideas and new innovations.  Currently, we’re looking for innovations to highlight and we want to feature yours. In addition, after the event, case studies on each innovation will be published on the Project’s globally recognized wiki and featured on our podcast, fyi: healthmarcomms.

Will you submit an innovation?  You can learn more by visiting the unNiched(micro) website. The submission deadline is September 26. If you have questions or comments, please get in contact.

We’d like to thank Andre for his continued and enthusiastic support of the Project and for providing us with a space to highlight the unNiched(micro) event.

In yesterday’s post published here on the NextDrop team, we covered the innovative project’s mission to empower a community around necessary resource through simple technology. With great support from the local community in Hubli-Dharwad and with the recent boost from the Knight News Challenge – the team look poised to create sustainable impact.

The question during their alpha phase of the pilot was, just how much impact will be created with this new venture?

Well last week the results came in. Check out their post explaining the numbers but also the human aspect of how this project has touched lives. In their feedback from citizens using the service, the team captured a story:

Ones all the family members went to marriage party in near to Hubli (one hour journey) ,when I get the SMS from Nextdrop   I came to know that water is flowing , suddenly I send my younger brother to home and fill the water because next day all the relatives are coming to the home, if we missed the water we have to wait again 6 to 8 days .Your service is very useful on that time.

This is what makes my day when it comes to simple innovations that are taking place around the world in regard to health, wellness and happiness. Kudos to the NextDrop team.

Have you noticed images like the one to the right sprouting up at every turn? I have. That, my dear readers, is a QR code, and it’s one trendy, useful piece of technology.

These 2-dimensional codes were developed by Denso Wave, a manufacturer of automatic data capture technology, and released to the market in 1994. QR stands for “quick response” and these symbols can serve up a large amount of data with a swift scan. They stand up to more dirt and damage than traditional codes with error-correction encoding. They are omni-directional (i.e. they can be read from any angle). One QR code can store 16 individual codes. And, they are able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Well, perhaps not that last one. If you’re interested in a few stats on this subject, head over to Social Wayne’s blog and check out his post on the subject, complete with infographic.

To read a QR code, a scanner must be installed on your mobile phone (your phone must also have a camera). A number of scanners are available free for download. Examples of types of data that can be stored in a QR code are:

• Phone number
• Email address
• Contact information in the form of a virtual business card
• Event details
• URL
• Geo location
• Simple text
• SMS (pre-populates the number and message)
• MMS
• WiFi configuration

This list is by no means exhaustive and clever programmers are expanding the utility of QR codes rapidly. After reading this list, are you also contemplating the ways we can leverage this technology in the public health realm? Curious about how this channel is being used, if at all, by healthcare and public health professionals, I scoured the internet for examples, and when few turned up, I put out a call via Twitter with some success.

Condensing member information on health insurance forms: Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Excellus is now incorporating a QR Code that directs people to learn more or obtain more of their information via QR Code. Because a QR Code can take half of the information that previous required multiple print pages and consolidate it to a singe sheet or two they are realizing a savings on their printing costs.

Driving traffic to a mobile Website:  Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

Takeda Pharmaceuticals points readers of a Uloric (gout medication) advertisement to a mobile Website.

Opt-in for reminders:  American Cancer Society.

The American Cancer Society leveraged QR code technology to drive users to a highly targeted mobile Website allowing users to sign-up for reminders about their breast cancer walk, send alerts to friends and donate to their cause.

Driving traffic to a mobile app:  Curatio CME Institute.

Curatio used the bar code to the left to drive clinicians to a mobile application of their Clinical Educator pocket tool. They used an other code on the front panel of a hematology symposium program book so participating physicians could access the Power Point slides on their mobile device.

QR Codes as an Assistive Technology

Digit-Eyes is an iPhone 3G app for the blind and visually impaired community. It makes text or audio QR Code labels you can read with your iPhone.

My hope is to see more and varied uses of QR code technology in the public health space in the near future. If you know of other examples, please tell me about them in the comments! Would also love your thoughts on how you can imagine how these lovely little codes could be leveraged for improvement of public health.

Just a quick post here to get you all on board with something that I’ve been working on and think will be very cool but at the same time very useful.

The Project:
SXSW is a massive event taking place in Austin, TX next week. The Interactive portion of the event will bring together tech, media and futurists together from around the world to discuss innovative around a variety of subjects. This year, health is going to be a focus (yay!). What better place to engage folks around donating their old mobile phones to a great cause. For those attending SXSW or attending in spirit – I want them to know about this fantastic project.

Where You Come In:
If you have an old mobile phone (or more!), please think about donating to the Hope Phones project. If you are attending SXSW, please bring your old mobile phones – there will be collection boxes at a few places near the Convention Center. I’ve created a nifty Google Form for you to enter information so that they can stay in touch. Most importantly, you will get an update on where in the world your donation has made an impact for community health. If  you sign up prior to or even during SXSW, we’ll make sure and send out a note on where you can drop off your phones. The team and I will also be popping up at various parties/events focused on health & social innovation (e.g. Good Capitalist Party, etc.).

Form Link: http://bit.ly/hopephonesSXSW

Spread the Word:
Please spread the word however you can within your networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The project is also on Twitter as @hopephones. Stay tuned for a new website design and more from them!

2011 is build mode folks. Stay tuned for more goodies coming from myself, Pulse + Signal, and others working to push the envelope and make positive changes in public/community health.

Here on Pulse + Signal I’ve covered the journey of Josh Nesbit, Isaac Holeman and the rest of the folks working to bring mobiles to global health innovation at FrontlineSMS:Medic. Whether it be through a CNN highlight, exclusive footage of their community health worker training or a Poptech write up – there is no doubt that my fascination with mHealth started with their work.

Late last month, the team decided to change their name from FrontlineSMS:Medic to Medic Mobile. The only thing that I see different is how much deeper they are affecting populations in need of revolutionary healthcare methods. Their announcement does a great job of giving insight into their journey of growth and impact. I also like how they pay homage to the platform that started it all – the FrontlineSMS product that Ken Banks put together years ago.

Medic Mobile maintains FrontlineSMS:Medic’s team, values, and mission – using mobile tools to create connected, coordinated health systems that save more lives.

Right on.

This is a guest post review of last week’s mHealth Summit by Alex Bornkessel – author information following the post.

This week’s mHealth Summit in Washington D.C rolled out the red carpet for some of the world’s top innovators including Ted Turner, Bill Gates, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra and over 2,000 participants from 30 countries. It was a learning hub and feeding ground for those in government, NGOs, research, technology, policy and business. But there’s one attendee I spotted throughout the conference that gained in notoriety and demand—behavior change.

The disconnect between awareness and behavior change was mentioned by a good number of keynotes and presentations—but played a leading role in back-channel conversation. This disconnect is a reality for consumers of mhealth, but also a large element in adoption and implementation of mhealth from a practitioner and research point of view as well.

Alex Howard, in his coverage of Bill Gates’ keynote presentation, sums up, what may be the greatest impact of the mHealth Summit:

Given the thousands of attendees walking around the floor to see the mobile technology on display, there will be more awareness of what’s happening by the end of the day.

Seeing and Meeting Opportunity

What is happening? More of those in a position of influence and impact are realizing the challenges we face in both domestic and global health. These people are also realizing the opportunity mobile technology can offer in alleviating and addressing these challenges and this is filtering down. Why? Because consumers demand, need, and use is filtering up. The idea of the impact we can have with something that fits in our pocket creates a spontaneous combustion called opportunity.

The awareness of this opportunity is increasing and people are starting to take action. Some blazing trails include:

· The World Food Programme and its use of mCommerce and “virtual vouchers” to create cost-savings, increase efficiency and increase sustainability of its food rationing programs.

· UNICEF and The Earth Institute’s Childcounts.org program—part of the Millennium Villages Project. ChildCount+ runs on an open-source platform utilizing SMS technology for data collection and reporting to improve child and maternal health.

· The Text4Baby SMS program, also aimed at improving child and maternal health, which reached over 100k subscribers this past week, and

· AIDS.gov—who displayed a proto-type of its upcoming, mobile-friendly HIV/AIDS Prevention and Service Locator built on Google Maps’ API—coming soon with geo-location functionality!

These are the trailblazers—the standouts. But in the back channel, there are a growing number of organizations wondering: How is this relevant to us and our mission? Where does mhealth fit into what we’re already doing?

Applying mHealth—Back to Basics

Not everyone can deploy research grants like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or create a Text4Health taskforce like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or invest in 25 research fellows like the National Institutes of Health. But we can learn from them—and that’s a benefit of events like the mHealth Summit.

But here’s what we need to remember: Mobile, in and of itself, is a tactic—not a panacea. Saying “We need mobile” is not a starting point. A good starting point is reading Dr. Patricia Mechael’s “Top 10 mHealth Lessons Learned.” The basics are the basics for a reason—and leaning on them doesn’t make us less innovative—it’s makes us more impactful. In Mechael’s Top 10, you’ll see traces of user-centered design, social marketing, health communications, and capacity building. In Lesson #10, Mechael says: We must unpack the pathways to mobile technology-motivated behavior change.

And there it is again—behavior change. mHealth may be emerging as a tool for behavior change, but behavior change comes with some friends of its own. Have you met them yet?

Additional mHealth Summitt Coverage:

• MobiHealthNews Slideshow: Faces at mHealth Summit
• mHealth Alliance’s Video Coverage of the Summit
• The mHealth Moment from the UN Dispatch
• Fast Company’s Highlights from the Summit
• The Economist’s “M Powered” article
• Washington Post’s Mobile Phones Tools of Health Promotion

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Alex Bornkessel writes at SocialButterfly, a blog highlighting social marketing, social innovation and social technology for social change. Check her out on Twitter as well and follow her tweets on the aforementioned subjects!

I recently got a chance to catch up with Chris Hall, formerly of Humana’s Innovation team and now at HealthCentral. Chris and I got to know each other after I began covering the Humana health games initiatives last year. I wanted to find out what his new plans were all about.

P/S:  Tell us a little bit about your background and what you did before joining HealthCentral.

You bet, Andre. So I grew up in Southern California, attended the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and served as an Acquisition Officer in the Air Force in exotic locations such as Germany, Alabama, Iraq, and Texas before I resigned my commission and joined Humana, America’s fourth largest health insurer. After a year managing internal projects, I found my way into Humana’s Innovation Center where I was able to convince the right people that we needed to create a small web development team focused on gleaning and visualizing health related data from the open Twitter, Google and Amazon Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Once we had the team built, I co-created three tools: myTPSreport, Diabatron and Shopensteinr…

P/S: What attracted you to HealthCentral and what exactly do you do there now?

The company, the job and the people attracted me to HealthCentral.

Information helps people understand their conditions, but it’s the people living with the conditions that help other people understand how to live with those same conditions. That is the premise of HealthCentral in a nutshell, so I was attracted to the company because I believe they have it right.

I also was attracted to the job, because out the gate I’m leading the development of an SMS/Web based mood visualization platform called Mood 24/7. And Mental Health is an issue that affects nearly 60 million American adults, according to the NIMH. We want to see how big of a dent we can put in that number with something as simple as a text message per day.

So that’s the company and the job, but then there are these extremely passionate people inside of HealthCentral that totally sealed the deal for me. My leadership, for example, is voluntarily helping the Government solve some of the nation’s toughest current health problems, on top of their daily duties within the company. My boss, Ted Smith, is auditing HHS data transparency plans and our CEO, Chris Schroeder, is doing everything he can to get Mood 24/7 in the hands of service members suffering from traumatic brain injuries and PTSD for free. On top of that, I get to work with one of the country’s top physicians, Dr. Adam Kaplin, who is the Principal Psychiatric Consultant to the Johns Hopkins Multiple Sclerosis and Transverse Myelitis Centers of Excellence.

It is an awesome opportunity.

P/S: Talk more about this product (Mood 24/7) that you are working on and how do you see it making an impact for our society’s health?

We believe that better treatment decisions can be made when more data is available. Mood 24/7 provides the data, while letting doctors and patients visualize the effects of mental health treatment in an easy way.

There are two parts to the system, an SMS text per day of a person’s mood rating, on a scale of one to ten. And the web based mood chart that allows doctors and patients to visualize mood changes as a result of treatment.

Anyone can sign up, pick a time of day to receive a Mood 24/7 text, and start tracking their mood. The real value occurs when doctors and patients review the mood charts together at their next appointment. They can actually see how effective a treatment has been on mood over time, via the Internet.

I see Mood 24/7 making an impact on our society’s health at scale. We have to be successful in getting it in front of and used by 100,000s of people, if not millions, and that’s what I’m working on at the moment. If everything goes according to plan, we should have some initial results by the time South By Southwest (SXSW) rolls around, next March. You’ll be able to hear about them if you vote for our presentation called, Suicide Mission: How Text Messages Can Save Lives before this Friday, August 27th.

P/S: What are your thoughts on mHealth and the potential to dramatically impact the health world?

I’m a fan of technology in general and think that mHealth is important because it gives people a real option to engage in their health through their mobile devices. It would be easy for me to speculate on different uses that could have an impact, but I’m most excited to learn from and build on what ends up working the best.

We do know that 91% of Americans use cell-phones, and at least one study has shown that text-message-based symptom monitoring during routine follow-up may be a reliable alternative to in-person interviews.

That’s why I’m bullish on mHealth in general and Mood 24/7 in particular.

P/S: You’ve really entrenched yourself in the health innovation world – what sort of things do you see on the horizon to make a lasting impact?

I think that the Air Force unlocked this weird passion of mine for figuring out ways to connect data together to make things easier. That also seems to be the big push in health at the moment, so we’ve sort of found each other at the right place and time. When it comes to medical records, the move from a doctor centric, paper based model to a patient centric digital model will be where the difference is made. It’s the most important problem in healthcare that we’re taking on, in my opinion, because so much is possible once we connect the data.

A world where ALL of my health information can be accessed by me or any doctor I allow at any time is the world I want to live in… and that’s a big reason why I’ve chosen to be a part of it.

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Chris Hall is the Director, Clinical Platforms at HealthCentral and, when he’s not busy eating carne asada burritos, he believes in connecting data to help people. Chris leads the development of Mood 24/7, an SMS based mood visualization platform, in partnership with Dr. Adam Kaplin and Johns Hopkins Medicine.