People who find it hard to breathe because of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have an effective, low-impact rehab program to stay healthy and out of the hospital. Very few of them use it, even though COPD is America's fourth-leading cause of death.
Now a study at the Mayo Clinic aims to find out whether doctors can use prescription-only iPads and wearable sensors to convince more people with COPD to do the pulmonary rehab that is proved to keep them more healthy. The technology teaches patients to do their low-impact rehab at home, because history shows 70 percent of them will fail to come to a clinic for it.
The independently funded clinical study is designed to generate objective data about the effectiveness of health care software made by Novu of St. Louis Park and wearable sensors from St. Paul's Minnesota HealthSolutions Corp. The study, doctors say, is also a glimpse into the future for the burgeoning field of mobile health (mHealth) applications.
"The technology is advancing pretty fast. So it comes down to how fast people can demonstrate evidence of predictability and accuracy and making sure that it's safe and that we actually can achieve better results with it," said HealthPartners vice president Dr. Kevin Ronneberg, who's not involved in the Mayo study.
The market for smartphone and tablet apps to improve health or wellness has exploded in recent years. An article in the Journal of Medical Internet Research documented more than 60,000 health-related programs on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store earlier this year.
In one display of commercial enthusiasm, Apple Inc. — the world's most valuable company — opened its long news conference on new consumer gadgets last month with a presentation about an mHealth app called Airstrip. The app allows secure messaging with physicians and remote monitoring of patients, giving expectant mothers, for example, a way to read and transmit maternal and fetal heart-rate data to their doctors.
The flood of mHealth devices has been challenging regulators.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration published new rules in 2013 in an attempt to regulate true mobile medical technology like Airstrip while limiting red tape that could strangle innovation in "wellness" programs and devices, which make up the large majority mobile health applications available today. (Airstrip Technologies has 12 different FDA approvals.)