From Mobile Phones to Personal Wellness Dashboards

The paradigm of wellness mobiles will enable health-care professionals to have access to comprehensive real-time patient data at the point of care and anywhere there is cellular network coverage. More importantly, users can continuously and frequently track their health on the go and receive real-time user assistance when needed to alter their lifestyles. Recently, there has been a growing interest in developing proactive wellness products and health-related smartphone applications. However, developing quantifiable measures of wellness for continuous tracking and designing compliant-monitoring systems is quite challenging. This article motivates future research in this emerging field by presenting a ringside view of the recent developments and trends favoring this technology and the challenges facing the next generation of telemedicine.