Mobile Health & Wellness

Think about a world where every time you pick up your phone, talk to Alexa or ask Siri a question; your health is being evaluated by artificial intelligence, applications, and other technology that may not exist today.  All this information is at your fingertips, yet it is overwhelming and confusing what to do with it.

Now think about a world where the only time you think about your health and wellness is after a crisis occurs.  You are bombarded with information from doctors, nurses, and perhaps family and friends.  This crisis, whether a chronic disease or an acute event, could negatively impact your life.  You might feel “too little too late” or be discouraged by having to make too many changes at once.  This can be overwhelming and scary.

Used alone, technology and human interactions have limited benefits to impacting health and well-being.  Individually each provides valuable insight but not a complete picture.  When combined, technology and human interaction enable a trained healthcare provider to provide individualistic care. This approach offers education, allows for targeted questions to assess a situation, and monitors any changes that may require immediate attention. 

To improve health and well-being, we need to return some of the care to the home.  Through the use of mobile technology and artificial intelligence, healthcare experts can gain valuable insight into someone’s everyday life and even deliver unique educational materials directly to the patient.  This shifts the goal towards achieving an understanding of one’s overall health and empowerment to communicate proactively before a crisis occurs.

The most successful technology must go beyond biometrics, which only provides a snapshot in time and does not address other barriers like social determinants of health or symptomology.  Social determinants of health impact an individual’s ability to get the care they need when they need it.  Symptomology is valuable because it helps the patient “connect the dots” between how they feel and their condition(s). 

One question to consider is how much data do we collect?  How do we avoid being intrusive but gather the information needed to improve the patient’s outcomes?  Is there a point where we are asking the patient to do too much?

When it comes to mobile health, I am concerned by the potential disconnect the patient may have from their healthcare team, primarily if someone only responds between visits when a crisis may be occurring.  To avoid this and meet the goal of understanding one’s overall health, there must be human interaction in unison with mobile technology. Technology alone is not a sufficient solution for improving health and wellness; however, it can provide the insight that guides education and builds an understanding of the person as a unique individual.

Through the combination of regular conversations with mobile technology, we can quickly gather more significant amounts of information without overwhelming the individual nor being intrusive, steering the individual to focus on what is important to them at that moment.