Activity trackers in wearables and health apps can record fluctuations in symptoms and quality-of-life modulators, which can be displayed daily, weekly, or monthly as numerical or graphical summaries. Technological advances make it feasible to collect new data types to provide a complete view of an individual’s health.
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The patient needs to contribute frequent data, and the healthcare professional needs access to the data to inform patient care. If we are to move toward personalized or precision medicine (meaning healthcare tailored to a specific individual), we need to look at up-to-date and real-life data.
That frequency can fail to capture the nuances in health changes that occur in people’s lives. The problem with relying solely on EMR data to assess someone’s health is that many people go for a healthcare checkup every year or even less often. The patient may answer a few questions, get some tests done, and then the results get stored in their EMR. Traditionally, medical data are collected during occasional doctor visits. Physicians are also open to integrating mHealth data to inform patient care, although they largely lack the proper training to do so .
Initiatives include nudges (reminders), social norms (how one compares with others), carrots (rewards), and sticks (penalties such as fees) to influence people’s health-related behaviors. There is significant interest from companies and health insurance networks to harness health fitness trackers to improve employee/patient health . Mobile technologies can be set up to interact with individuals directly and prompt them to manage their health better. mHealth is appealing to consumers, as shown by the popularity of fitness apps and wearables . In a broad sense, mHealth encompasses the use of wearables, tablets, and smartphone apps that collect health-related information. mHealth is a subset of digital health that the World Health Organization defines as the “use of mobile technology to support the achievement of health objectives ”. Popular domains of digital health include adopting electronic medical records (EMRs) or implementing telehealth and telemedicine technologies that enable remote care. This paper concludes by offering suggestions for consideration about improving privacy and confidentiality notices.ĭigital health is a large field that refers to the use of technology in biomedical research . We include brief discussions about inadvertent or unintended consequences of digital data collection and the trade-off between privacy and public health interests, such as is illustrated by COVID-19 contract tracing apps. But what are the privacy considerations with mHealth? This paper explores global data privacy protections, enumerates principles to guide regulations, discusses the tension between anonymity and data utility, and proposes ways to improve how we as a society talk about and safeguard data privacy. These mHealth data can supplement the measures taken by healthcare professionals during regular doctor’s visits, with mHealth having the advantage of a much greater frequency of collection. Wearables and health apps can continuously monitor metrics such as physical activity, sleep, and heart rate, to name a few. There is increasing interest in using wearables and smartphone health apps to collect health-related data, a domain within digital health referred to as mHealth. The use of digital health technologies is changing the ways people monitor and manage their health and well-being.