mHealth and Applications

The field of mobile health (mHealth) focuses on the uses of mobile technologies to support the delivery of healthcare services and management of health in everyday life. mHealth tools range from clinical applications for remote patient monitoring and shared decision making to tools intended to help individuals better manage chronic conditions or make health-promoting lifestyle changes. In addition, mHealth tools leverage sensors, phone-based questionnaires, and activity inference to facilitate low-burden data collection in research, greatly enhancing our ability to understand how context, activity, and physiological processes interact to shape health and health behavior. This chapter traces the history of mHealth, highlights key features of these technologies that make them uniquely suited for delivery of health interventions, and overviews areas of health services and health promotion for which they are used. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of ethical issues raised by the rapid growth of mHealth.