Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Health Apps Useful, But Unused

(1/2) > >>

Renegade:
An interesting article on a software category:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/technology/news/article/-/15968297/health-apps-abound-but-usage-low-study/

US consumers are being offered a vast range of smartphone apps to track or manage health, but only a small number of people are using them, according to a survey.

The Pew Research Center's study found that only about seven percent of people surveyed used a smartphone app to track a health indicator like weight, diet, exercise routine or to monitor a chronic disease such as diabetes.

"There's still a low uptake in terms of apps and technology," said lead researcher Susannah Fox.

"It is surprising. We've been looking at health apps since 2010, and health app uptake has been essentially flat for three years."

The research suggests that consumers are slow to latch on to smartphone technology for health even in a market with hundreds of new apps coming on the market to manage weight and track blood pressure, pregnancy, blood sugar, diabetes or medication.
--- End quote ---

Seems like a category that people just don't manage to work into their daily routines.

eleman:
Or it's perhaps a category of apps that ask for too many inputs too frequently to make the app inconvenient, and return only common sense answers you would already know.

Renegade:
Or it's perhaps a category of apps that ask for too many inputs too frequently to make the app inconvenient, and return only common sense answers you would already know.
-eleman (January 30, 2013, 06:48 AM)
--- End quote ---

Crappy category or crappy design? Interesting question.

eleman:
It's perhaps related more with the nature of medicine (as a field). Despite all the research and improvements in the field, the object of medical science is still far too complicated, and input data is still inadequate to provide medicine with the predictive power we would come to expect from hard (not as in difficult) sciences (such as physics).

I'm not supporting the alternative medicine and homeopathy silliness. Medicine as a science is our best shot at understanding and fixing our medical problems, but it is still way too far from perfect.

In this picture, the data you can practically feed into a simple phone is bound to be too limited to help it reach specific conclusions (i.e. "You have invasive ductal carcinoma"). So the results provided by the app are bound to be either what you would reach through common sense, or useless. To make the matters worse, data input cannot be automated as the phone lacks hardware sensors (I hear galaxy S XXIV will incorporate cat scan ability though), so they are cumbersome to use.

Renegade:
Well, I don't expect that the bulk of health apps are designed to diagnose esoteric illnesses, but just things like how far you jogged that day, or other simple things. But people just aren't using them.

As for allopathic and homeopathic medicine, my opinion is better mostly confined to the Basement. I've seen "homeopathic silliness" work and used it to good effect. Nuff said. I'm a firm believer in logic, mathematics and physics (you could call me an extremist there) in that order. Both have their place. There are nutjobs and con-men in both camps.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page