Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Matt Marshall has a nice post on the health applications on iphone 3.0.

For my entire life, I’ve relied on habit. I wake up when my eyes open in the morning (sometimes prompted by the alarm clock), eat when my tummy says its time, exercise in the mornings, and fall asleep when I’m dead tired.

But the applications being built for the latest “3.0″ version of the iPhone operating system — and likely soon for a number of other smartphones — promise to monitor my every step, my cycles, my health, constantly, via sensors on my skin. They may make me even more efficient.

Right now, they’re focused on people with serious ailments. Last month, LifeScan, a Johnson & Johnson company focused mainly on diabetes monitoring devices and software, demonstrated a Bluetooth-enabled blood glucose monitor that syncs with the iPhone’s 3.0 operating system. The video demo is below. The iPhone 3.0 OS, to be released sometime this summer, lets the phone interact with other devices, thus making all this possible.

Looking forward to this, a bunch of companies are working away on applications that monitor all of your six vitals: These vitals are temperature, heart rate, heart rhythm, respiration rate, blood pressure and 02 saturation (or the amount of oxygen you have in your blood). I’m told there’s no reason that all six vitals can’t be tracked from a single sensor — which would then be synced to a phone application via Bluetooth. With all that information, the phone could do some cool stuff: If you drink too much caffeinated coffee on an empty stomach, your phone might be able to alert you that you’re extremely agitated and that you may want to cool off before you slap your annoying office-colleague upside the head.

The Lifescan application (screenshot at left) was created as a prototype for Apple to show off the iPhone 3.0’s capabilities — which allow companies to build apps customized for external devices like a glucose meter — but the product is not ready for commercial launch. Why use an iPhone, instead of the non-phone version of the wireless software? For one, LifeSpan says diabetics often feel lonely, and hooking up to the iPhone will let them communicate with others using social networking features.

Here is a video on medical apps & iphone: