A friend and I were talking recently about a home health monitoring system, an early entry into the burgeoning field of mobile health (mHealth). We both expressed doubt that the product would ever become popular.

My friend said it reminded him of other short-lived tech products he had seen over the years. Like a deck-of-cards-sized device that had a dim green and gray screen on which was displayed (for a modest monthly fee) traffic conditions on the local freeways. Or the cat-shaped input device that would sit by your computer mouse (get it?) and be used – its inventors envisioned – to scan special bar codes in newspapers and magazines, which would direct the user to a web site.

Common to these failed products was their narrowness of application. It occurred to me that, while it may be fool’s game to predict exactly where the mobile health market will go and what specific technologies will succeed, wide acceptance will come only to those products and services that include three key characteristics:

1. General appeal in terms of usability (e.g. GUIs; compatible operating systems).

2. The ability to perform specific, precise tasks to meet the needs of the individual (patient, healthcare provider or both).

3. Connectivity to a central source of comprehensive healthcare information relevant to the condition in question.

If I’m right, it means that a product or service that makes a really big splash in the mHealth universe will be more than just, for example, creating a smart phone app that lets a user track their daily exercise and calories. It will be more than a system that sends a user a text reminding them when to take medication. It will be more than a central database of healthcare information. It will, instead, be all these and more.

Will such a product or service build on an existing platform such as smart phones or the iPad? Without question, some will. But just as the introduction and spectacularly fast acceptance of the iPad seemed to come as a surprise to many, there may very well be an analogous, equally surprising mHealth product being developed right now. It remains my position, however, that whatever system achieves dominance, it will be one that combines these three key characteristics.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Healthcare Marketing, Marketing Medical Devices, Medical Device Marketing, mHealth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.