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.

Marketing Medical Devices: Mobile health is a catchphrase for almost anything health-related on your smartphone or computer. What does it mean to you? See my guest post on Medical Marcom.

Mobile health (mHealth)’s parallels to cell phone adoption, my guest post on medical device marketing consultancy Medical Marcom.

Summing up the SXSWi held in Austin, TX from March 12-15th I’d have to say ‘opportunity’ and ‘uncertainty’ were the two words that came up the most following the Social Health sessions at this event.

Opportunity lies ahead for mHealth application development and healthcare IT, as pointed out by Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, considered to be a thought leader in emerging technology trends.   At the end of his keynote interview he turned to the audience and encouraged all the entrepreneurs to seriously consider Healthcare IT for start-up opportunities there.

And on the mHealth app development front John Pettengill at Razorfish rightly pointed out, mHealth apps need to be patient focused not technology focused, especially when dealing with chronic conditions.  Just because coders can pull out lots of charts and graphs from the data doesn’t mean that it will be useful or attractive to paitents.  As for healthcare IT, the best sessions dealing with Health 2.0, EHRs and the huge gray area of how this uncertain market will develop were the #health2dev session moderated by Indu Subaiya and following session on health apps with BJ Fogg from Stanford University.

At one point Professor Fogg asked how many gamers/app developers were in the audience and one lone guy raised his hand in a room of 100+ people.  I’ll be interested to see how many more gamers will make their into this audience next year.  I think there will be many more.

This week I attended a webinar hosted by IBM on the trends for in-home medical devices based on research done in 2010 with over 1,300 US and UK consumers by IBM’s Institute for Business Value. (Here’s the link to the webinar http://bit.ly/bSgY73 )

What I found most interesting was that the research toppled some well-established assumptions such as: 1) consumers are unhappy with their current in-home wellness devices; and 2) in-home devices are mainly used for known health conditions (vs. preventative care devices).  On both counts the research results came back opposite of the ‘common assumptions’.  It seems that consumers are satisfied with their current devices and are ready for more, especially as people become so attuned to using small hand-held electronic devices.  And it seems that the message about preventative care and the benefits it affords is making its way into the home. That to me equates to market opportunities for ‘prevention devices’ (like tracking exercise and physical activity) and even remote monitoring of “someone’s changing health conditions”.