What is eHealth and why you can’t miss this trend
eHealth apps and devices are typically viewed as gadgets these days, designed to aggregate data on our well-being and everyday tasks. We think of them as ways to monitor and support a healthier lifestyle. This is just one side of the story though. ←READ_MORE →
eHealth apps and equipment are basically a collection of technologies enabling us to maintain and preserve our health regardless of its state. A rapid growth of this technology in recent years is related to a higher availability of various mobile and medical devices on the market both for doctors and their patients.
Wellness apps are most popular right now as they gather information related to our current lifestyle. However, figures like a number of burned calories, distance traveled, activity time, heart rate and other data can be useful in something more that just monitoring your diet. We can use it in more advanced healthcare programs, for example, for patients with diabetes who use insulin pumps or for people suffering from heart diseases.
We can gather data on processes we didn’t give much thought until now and it seems like we should start doing that as soon as possible.
For example: since 2011, Polish hospitals have been performing over 24,000 coronary artery stent grafts a year. After a surgery every patient has to undergo an antiplatelet therapy, otherwise, clots will appear in the stent. That, in turn, may lead to myocardial infarction and death. A small percentage of patients disregards doctors’ orders and either stops taking their medicines or takes them in irregular doses.
Who is eHealth for?
As mentioned above, eHealth apps are no longer limited to losing weight or monitoring workout progress. Several new groups of users are already here.
On one hand, target users of eHealth apps are not a coherent group. Reasons for reading and monitoring your body health data and aggregating them for further analysis may vary greatly from person to person.
There are also people who use apps to measure and control their own activities, for example, how a certain diet or other nutrients affect their body or how physical efforts affect their well-being.
The third group consists of patients who need apps to remind them to perform certain actions like self-check procedures or just to take medications in a course of their day. eHealth also includes devices for post-surgery patients (typically heart surgery, intravascular surgery, and neurosurgery), who need to take medications in precise dosage and time intervals to avoid serious complications.
What is equally important is that these groups constantly grow in numbers. Research shows that number of people with diagnosed diabetes is growing, both in Poland and worldwide. There are also more and more patients who require heart monitoring or need to stick to a certain diet or lifestyle.
What is more, an average age of these users is declining and we have to remember that young people embrace technology in everyday life as something perfectly natural. That doesn’t prevent the elderly or children (with parental supervision) from using eHealth apps as long as the UI is properly adjusted to their needs.
