mHealth and keeping fit Apps for Blackberry

From Brian Dolan, Mobile Health news:

When Fraser Edward joined Research In Motion (the company behind BlackBerry) four years ago, the device maker had only three partners for mobile healthcare applications, Edward said during a panel session at the American Telemedicine Association in Las Vegas. Today, Edward is RIM’s business manager of market development for Health & Life Sciences, and the company has 30 healthcare applications in its recently launched BlackBerry App World store.

During his presentation, Edward showed a slide of 12 mobile health companies that are “BlackBerry Solutions Partners,” which means they are clients of RIM to take advantage of the company’s marketing channels, developer know-how and more. Here’s a rundown of the 12 companies Edward counted as Solutions Partners and the mHealth buckets he put them in:

Fitness

AllSportGPS — powered by Trimble — GPS-enabled mobile application for coaching on cycling, mountain biking, running, walking and other sports activities.

BonesInMotion – GPS-enabled app targeting those participating in outdoor activity 3 or more times a week: fitness walking, running, cycling, hiking, mountain biking, GeoCaching, and other outdoor activities.

BodyMedia – Wearable, “fashionable” body monitors that record and transmit a variety of physiological data to the BodyMedia’s website.

Healthy Lifestyle

Myca - Enables nutrition professionals connect with their clients through video consults, messaging, a personalized website, and a picture food journal.

Sensei - Makes mobile health applications for a wide variety of handsets, but most recently launched a couple of iPhone applications, including one for diabetics.

Personal Health Records

Tolven - Open source healthcare solutions developer of PHRs, clinician health records and health informatics.

CapMed - Offers PHRs for families to keep track of their own health data.




Corporate Wellness/Chronic Disease Management

t+Medical - Offers disease management and remote monitoring services that work with most mobile phones and also does some work with clinical trial management.

Medtronic - Develops medical devices and services to help people better manage chronic diseases.

Healthanywhere - Offers applications that let users monitor their health from a smartphone, PC or from a “dedicated Healthanywhere supplied platform.”

Confidant - Provides a mobile-phone based service that includes feedback, coaching and context to a patient’s chronic disease management routine, while simplifying and automating the flow of information between patients and their healthcare providers.

RIM also partners with chipmaker AMD for Corporate Wellness and Chronic Disease management.

More healthcare/fitness apps for Blackberry can be seen here.

Keep fit with 'Run Keeper'

A new application on iPhone helps keep fit without worrying about keeping track of the minute details. Run Keeper, centers on a really simple tracker that follows your location as you run via GPS, then puts that information into a personal database.

Every time you complete a run you can see how far you went (to the best of the phone's tracking capabilities), along with the time spent and how it compares with previous runs, all on a Google Map.

Developer Jason Jacobs of FitnessKeeper tells us it's just the tip of the iceberg for planned development and that much bigger things are on the way. For people too cheap to shell out for Nike's iPod nano-centric run tracker this makes a viable alternative albeit with less integration with iTunes. Nice, however, is the option to check out your data from any computer since the maps and runs are stored in the cloud.

While Jacobs has designed the application for tracking runs, another viable use for this is tracking trips in vehicles. Businesses looking to keep an eye on their employees' short-haul trips could use such a system to make sure they're going where they said they did.

The following Video on youtube has demonstration: