04-13-10

Life In Balance? There’s An App For That!

Smart phones are proving to be, well, pretty darn smart. When it comes to health, wellness and a balanced lifestyle, they provide the ability to carry along a lot of information when we’re on the go. And many of the mobile applications designed for the iPhone, Google Android (including Motorola’s new Droid device) and BlackBerry are great, whether for maintaining your diet, workout progress or managing health records.

‘Weightbots’ for instance is a very straightforward, easy to use iPhone/iPod Touch weight tracking app, which actually makes losing some of that excess winter weight kind of fun with functions like its graph mode, a quick way to visually track your progress. And you may want to ditch your personal trainer in exchange for Android’s ‘Gym Buddy’ app, a very effective work-out tracking tool.

On the personal health side, there are apps like ‘Glucose Buddy’, a free iphone app, that helps diabetics monitor and control their blood sugar levels, diet, exercise and medication. Want to keep all yours and your family’s health records, doctors’ contact info and more in the palm of your hand? There’s an app for that called ‘Healthsync’. For Android, there’s ‘My Moble Med Box’ from mHealth and for Blackberry users, ‘My Personal Health Record’.

Many of the better food and nutrition apps are built for iPhone and Android, with many apps focused on vegetarians and special diet concerns. If you find yourself succumbing to your kids craving fast food, the ‘Fast Food Calorie Counter’ is an indispensible app for both iPhone and Android users, providing details of all the major chain restaurants, and nutritional details of every menu item. On the other hand, there’s ‘GoodFoodNearYou’
that recommends nearby healthy food options based on your current location, which is tracked via GPS.

Equally innovative are some of the apps that cleverly leverage inherent mobile functionalities like iTreadmill, which transforms your iphone into your personal pedometer (and virtual treadmill!) by using the device’s motion sensors to calculate your body movement. On the other hand, we’re not as convinced about the iPhone app, ‘Massage Me’ that uses the phone’s vibration motor to, “provide you with a relaxing massage.” And things start to get even more gimmicky with the plethora of self-hypnosis apps.

Still, The New York Times reported today that by the end of 2011, 50% of Apple’s total revenue will come from sales of the iPhone and iPod Touch – in 2001, 80% of Apple’s revenue was from its line of Mac laptops and desktop computers. So it’s easy to see that we’re quickly becoming a ‘mobile culture’.

Yet personal health apps trail entertainment apps, which obviously provide much greater returns on investment. But with our aging demographic, development will continue to grow out of necessity, and – according to mobile marketing expert, Erik Goldhar – with the steadily emerging, advanced capabilities of being able to surf the net on your smart phone, we’ll soon see a surge of extremely innovative ‘touch mobile’ websites designed especially for the touch screen devices.

In the coming weeks we’ll report on the many potential advantages of mobile websites and mobile applications with regard to health and wellness… plus exciting interactive developments in the digital world of Rose Reisman.

Stay tuned, or we should say, connected.