mTech Popularizes Self-Tracking & Drives Patient Empowerment

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published “Know Thyself—Via Gadgets and Apps,” offering clear examples of how mobile technology is bringing self-tracking into the mainstream consumer market with products like the Nike + Fuelband and Jawbone Up.

Previously, MobiHealth News reported that seven out of ten American adults track their health in some way, but only about one fifth use tech tools to do so.1 With the wearables and device market exploding, I expect self-tracking will become the new rage. We could write it off as a New Age form of self-absorption or praise it as a form of honest examination, as journalist Holly Finn does, but I think it’s more than that. These new self-tracking tools invite, encourage, and support us to engage with and take responsibility for the health decisions we make every day about our diet, exercise, sleep, and stress.

Recently, the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions released “mHealth in a mWorld,” a report which predicts that mobile technologies will radically transform the health care system and produce more empowered and informed patients. The report authors, Harry Greenspun and Sheryl Coughlin, point to digital technologies as key drivers in creating a “more-efficient, patient-centered” health care. They suggest these technologies can offer people “instant, on-demand access to their medical records and powerful clinical decision support tools that empower patients to actively participate in their treatment plans.”2

When it comes to self-tracking, Greenspun and Coughlin also highlight the importance of mobile tools in helping us “captur[e] and analyz[e] self-reported data with objective behavioral and contextual information,”2 which can help us and our doctors make better decisions about what is really best for our health and well-being.

Next week, members of the Tech urSelf team will attend the San Francisco Quantified Self meetup. We are really excited to demo our soon-to-be released app, urWell, which helps people track trends in their life and make positive life choices to help them be happier and healthier. We can’t wait to hear what the group thinks of urWell and talk to other self-trackers about how mobile technology is changing the Quantified Self movement and health care, in general.

For us at Tech urSelf, it’s clear that mobile technologies are creating an opportunity to completely re-imagine how we collect data about our lives, consume health information and services, and make health decisions. These technologies are forcing disruption, innovation, and a complete reassessment and re-envisioning of health care. This paradigm shift is incredibly exciting and necessary in the health 2.0 world.

References

1. Jonah Comstock. Pew: 70 Percent of Americans are Self-trackers. MobiHealth News. Nov. 2, 2012.

2. Harry Greenspun, Sheryl Coughlin. mHealth in an mWorld: How Mobile Technology is Transforming Health Care. Deloitte Center for Health Solutions.

This blog was originally published by Tech urSelf Inc.