August is National Immunization Awareness Month, in case you weren’t aware. A couple months ago, my friend, Dr. April Foreman, introduced me to an impromptu group of health advocates who were all interested in the practical application of social media to raise awareness around immunizations. The group has been organized using online tools, and picked [...]

This week marks my one year anniversary with Mood 24/7, and today Mood 24/7 was featured  on a Kansas Public Radio piece called: A New Way to Track Mood Changes. Perfect timing. Bryan Thompson, who is the Health Reporter at KPR, interviewed Dr. Adam Kaplin (Mood 24/7′s inventor) Dr. April Foreman (A Mood 24/7 Early [...]

Over the past 10 months, it’s become clear that text messages just don’t work for some people. They either don’t have a text plan, have a plan that makes it hard to receive texts from a shortcode, or don’t live in the U.S. We’ve been listening. I’m happy to announce that Mood 24/7 now allows [...]

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend the 2011 Health Data Initiative Forum at the National Institutes of Health’s Natcher Conference Center. In case you weren’t able to make it, the hashtag was #healthapps, and here are 5 things that caught my attention at this year’s forum: Ozioma – Ozioma is a site, currently finishing [...]

It’s amazing what a single piece of data, recorded daily, can tell you. This time, we set out to discover the best and worst days of the week by anonymously aggregating at least 50 mood ratings from 500 Mood 24/7 members. The results were different than expected. While 14% of Mood 24/7 members feel that [...]

…a future where coupon downloads are tied to every pharamaceutical ad…and your physician is able to track your compliance not by what you enter into a record, but what your phone records you hearing/doing (or NOT hearing/doing)…!

After a week of reflecting upon the Health 2.0 Spring Fling event I attended last weekend in San Diego a couple of things about the state of health in the Web 2.0 world have started to resolve themselves. Own your own health I was impressed by the array of companies and individuals in attendance who [...]

I want to add my South by Southwest (SXSW) recap to the countless blog posts already out there with five things that captured my imagination at this year’s conference. Needless to say, these are things that I’m already very interested in, so we sort of found each other this year. In no particular order: data [...]

I’m headed to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest today, to listen to people talk about great new ideas on designing the world we want to live in and to overuse the word awesome with old friends, internet friends and new friends too… but this post isn’t about all that. This post is about the [...]

Last week I became curious about how sites like Travelocity and Orbitz get their information. When I think about all of the different flights, times, locations and prices that I can access in real time with a few clicks of a mouse, it makes me wonder why something equivalent doesn’t exist between Doctors and Insurance [...]

Dr. Deborah Estrin is the Jon Postal Chair in Computer Networks at UCLA, and is leading the Open mHealth Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) Project. I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Estrin this morning, and it was great to talk with somebody who is passionate about the “plumbing” that is necessary for [...]

Mood 24/7 has over 3,000 registered users and nearly 150 Medical Professionals using it, and I’m pumped that we’re pushing out some new features for our growing community of mood trackers. Here is what we’ve been up to recently: MOBILE charts We’ve updated our charts, so you can now log in and view your personal [...]

The number one million, doesn’t mean what it used to… but it is still an important number in mobile health technology. Mainly because we haven’t heard it used much, in the context of adoption. The fitness and nutrition category has bested the coveted one million user mark, but I haven’t seen any other category touting [...]

Saturday marked the first Health 2.0 Developer Challenge (or hackathon, if you will) in Washington, D.C.  While a few of these challenges have happened before (in such far-away places as San Francisco), this was the first to be centered in our nation’s capital, the heart of health public policy, and only a stone’s throw from [...]

If the World Health Organization defined the term “health” as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity back in 1948, then can we really believe that health records only containing information about our physical health will be a panacea for the future of health [...]

You know that the Super Bowl is a big deal in America when 60,000 plus people vote on whether or not they liked the half time show… So what if you could visualize the relationship between geography, mood and Super Bowl XLV? We got curious about this and averaged the daily mood ratings of anonymous [...]

The term “mHealth” is pretty broad in nature. There are at least two distinct branches stemming from the core concept of mobile health: connected devices and digital applications. Of these two branches, here is a list of subcategories of digital health applications: Digital mHealth web The original mHealth application is a web site that allows [...]

I’m leading the development of an SMS and web based mood tracking service called, Mood 24/7. You may be developing a health product of your own, and really need to get into the heads of your target audience. The traditional approach would be to spend tens of thousands of dollars and a couple months to [...]

I talk with people a lot about data collection. After all, when you break Mood 24/7 down to its core, you find a data collection service. When pitching the benefits of tracking a single daily health data point, I’ve found the general response to be quite telling of American culture… Nine times out of ten [...]

Last November, Microsoft unveiled the Kinect and sold 8 million units worldwide in 60 days. In case you don’t know what the Kinect is, it’s a sophisticated camera that use infrared lights to locate and track 48 points on the human body for up to two people at a time, in conjunction with an Xbox [...]

There is a lot of information out there about Holiday Depression & Loneliness and Holiday Depression & Stress, but the Mood 24/7 team wanted to see what Holiday Depression looked like among our user base. So we calculated the average daily mood from every anonymized Mood 24/7 user’s daily mood rating between Thanksgiving and New [...]

That’s what this MIT report would have you believe, if you believe it. I don’t for two reasons: Boomers are fourth among age groups owning Smartphones and third from last when it comes to texting by age group… at least according to the charts below from 2010. I understand that boomers are the “aging population” [...]

America’s hot new question and answer site, Quora, just compelled me to answer a question that I’ve been chewing on for some time now: Which mobile apps really improve health behavior? I love this question because it’s about health outcomes, a hot topic during last November’s mHealth Summit… but one that you’d be hard pressed [...]

I’ve been “into” the concept of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for a few years now, because I think that in general they have pretty big implications in health. If research is based on data, then what better data sets exist than the ones we voluntarily fill out about ourselves on the regular? Programmable Web is [...]

Data sets are much more interesting when compared to other data sets. But they’re even more interesting than that, when they’re animated, eh? If you’ve always been curious of how wealth determines health, but didn’t know where to look, then I recommend taking the next four minutes of your life to let Hans Rosling, Director [...]

One of the best parts about my job is using social media to meet interesting people at the intersection of health, technology and the Internet. I’ve decided that I would like to share some of these experiences here on the SoHealth blog, as a collection of the people I think are pushing things in those [...]

The 2010 mHealth Summit hit Washington DC this week, and if you missed it then you missed out. There was definitely more of a buttoned up feel to this particular conference… with lots of suits being worn and a regulatory vibe buzzing through the massive Walter E. Washington Convention Center. But in the end I [...]

I’m a tech/gadget nerd, I work for a health media company, and I’m pumped. Why? Because it’s 4Q 2010 and tablet manufacturers from around the world are finally set to flood the market with their creations. Juxtapose that with the recent CompTia survey showing that 1 in 4 Physicians and Dentists plan to purchase a [...]

We entered Mood 24/7 into the Practice Fusion Patient Driven Data Challenge, because data portability is where health is headed. Especially as bio-sensors become more a part of our daily lives. It just makes sense for people who have decided to engage in their health by recording activity data to be able to have all [...]

Are you excited about mHealth, but don’t really have concrete facts to back up your enthusiasm? I was in your shoes once, but don’t fret… There has been a ton of research conducted on the mobile industry and mobile users in particular, and the best part is that the high points all seem to have [...]

An April 2010 study conducted by the California Healthcare Foundation, surveying 1,848 Americans over the age of 18, found that only 7% of Americans have used PHRs. What’s interesting is that out of all of the PHRs on the market today,  it was difficult to find five of them with either an existing open API [...]

After reading and reading, it seems that the mHealth phenomenon can really be broken down into two parts: data collection and data distribution. Put plainly, any value derived from mHealth lies in the data being collected from patients and distributed throughout the health care system. You may not believe me, but let’s suppose that we [...]

It’s Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD Awareness Week, which makes it a great time to put a list of iPhone apps together that have been built to test for ADHD and provide ADHD support for both people living with, and those that are caring for people with ADHD. After you’ve looked through these ADHD [...]

Is your iPhone acting different when connected to accessories since upgrading to iOS 4.0? Like many others, my iPhone 3g has become very slow since upgrading the operating system to 4.0. In all honesty, I really didn’t want to upgrade because I had read all the rumblings around the Internet about it. I was forced [...]

24 hours after Google’s new Instant search has gone live, Internet gurus have established that Instant will have an effect on search that falls somewhere between apocalyptic and negligible.  Some initial findings include the fact that: SEO is dead SEO is not dead Instant will kill the longtail of search Instant will lengthen the longtail [...]

Allow myself to introduce… myself. My name is Chris Hall and I am leading the development of Mood 24/7, as well as staying up on mHealth in general. And it’s an exciting time to be involved in the sexy side of health, if you ask me. The short version of my story is that I [...]

Close to 2,000 startup founders, investors and assorted tech junkies converged on New York last week for TechCrunch Disrupt, a one-of-a-kind conference to discuss where the internet is headed and who gets to lead us there.  The three-day event was held in the abandoned back offices of Merril Lynch. It was a fitting symbol of [...]

My weekly tutoring has turned into a fascinating sociology lesson. In the past few weeks, I’ve learned my blackberry is “ancient” (true), that most teachers communicate with students and parents via email and post assignments online (not surprising), and that Justin Bieber is the cutest guy of all time (weird). Last night, one of my [...]

We’re learning new stuff everyday since we launched HabitWatch, the iPhone app that prompts people to track their habits.  Since a week or so ago, we’ve been watching the numbers of downloads (pretty normal & climbing steadily) and number of habits entered (both good and bad). BUT – the thing that surprised us most was [...]

For a number of years, SEO folks have fruitlessly wondered if or how Google has used searcher behavior to improve the results it serves up.  Will they push a site down if searchers ignore that link on the results page?  Or bump it up if searchers click through and spend a lot of time on [...]

Investigating the Short Tail Summer of ‘09 For the last 3-4 years, no single topic has dominated conversation about how searchers access health information like the rise of the Long Tail.  The phalanx of geeks who find search query length fascinating have documented how searchers have transitioned from treating the search box like a directory [...]

A lot has been written about whether Bezos’ Kindle will be slayed by Jobs’ iPad, with reviewers dissecting everything from the latter’s screen resolution to lack of camera. Less has been written on the impact that Apple’s new toy will have on struggling print publishers, with articles like this one “Can Apple’s Tablet Save Newspaper [...]

I was recently invited to speak at the mHealth Networking Conference in Washington DC about the role mobile phones can play in disease management. It was clear from the two days of presentations that mobile for health is an area of challenge and opportunity.  Most of us are easily excited by novel health iPhone apps [...]