Digital health apps for smartphones from head to toe

Will digital health apps and devices for smartphones become so indispensable that we wonder how we functioned without them? Or do they risk becoming part of an enormous data avalanche? Those questions were raised in a recent article examining digital health by Fast Company that maps smartphone apps and devices across a human body.

AliveCor has developed an app that can read heart rhythms when users press their iPhones to their chests. The company expects to file for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this year. California-based CellScope‘s device can transform a smartphone into a mini microscope. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based BodyMedia‘s Armbands keeps track of how the body uses energy through skin temperature, heartbeat, heat dissipation and time spent at rest.

Although at $2 billion the mobile health, or digital health, market is a relatively small sliver of the $273 billion medical device market, the article says experts predict that number will rise sharply in the next 10 years as smartphones get more sophisticated and patients seek to reduce the high costs and hassles of healthcare.