Mobile Health Apps That Share

The Open mHealth project, developed at UCLA and UCSF, provides technology for  health apps that transmit a variety of data to the project's central data warehouse. This data can include information entered by users and also such things as smart-phone GPS- and accelerometer-tracking information. One pilot project, for instance, is studying the diet, stress, movement, and exercise patterns of overweight new mothers. Users have control over what data is captured and get to choose with whom it is shared. Hospitals, health-care providers, and startup companies could design additional apps to draw on the data.

Mobile phones are increasingly used to track illness and promote wellness, but for the most part, this occurs by way of a patchwork of incompatible applications doing different jobs, says Deborah Estrin, professor of computer science, director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a researcher on Open mHealth. "Right now, most of the mobile health applications send data back to a proprietary website which could sell the information back to you or to others."

Estrin says sharing mobile health data could help advance medical research: "When people share components of the infrastructure, there is more rapid innovation than when people are working separately to reinvent the wheel."