As a BodiMojowriter who also frequently covers healthcare technology, I was curious to see what a recent seminar on wireless and mobile services would say—if anything—about how teens play into this ever-changing arena. Quite a bit, it turns out. The session, which was part of the Center for Connected Health’s conference this week at Harvard Medical School, included a group of talking heads from the telecom and consumer healthcare industry who predicted that videochat, smart bandaids (biosensors that connect to cell phones and other devices) and text messaging, in particular, would be the new health IT tools in the next three years.
Text messaging? Now for anyone who has a teenager on their family radar screen, as I do, this is It—how you chat with friends when Facebook isn’t handy. Text messaging, said Don Jones, a VP at Qualcomm, is already a $100 billion business with 75 billion text messages sent in one month alone—“and that reaches every age up into the 60s,” said Jones. “The kids may have started it but the parents who want to talk to kids also have to learn how to do it.”
Jones and his counterparts, John Maschenic of Verizon Wireless and Robert Schwarzberg of Sensei, also touted—what else—the cell phone as the main player in healthcare transformation. “Those of us who are trying to build applications today are trying to re-create the personal relationship that people have with their phone,” says Schwarzberg of Sensei, a company that is a pioneer in mobile and Web-based wellness solutions. Jones added, “We’re applying the notion of gaming theory to applications, to create tools like accelerometers (tiny devices that discern movement) and adapting them into calorie counters and activity monitors. We believe that health and wellness can be fun, interactive, and part of a social network.”
Well, if that last sentence doesn’t echo our BodiMojo mission, I don’t know what does. To repeat a line from BodiMojo’s philosophy: “BodiMojo believes the future of health resides within our ability to provide motivation and incentives in an increasingly mobile and consumer orientated world. Health can be fun, and it can be habit forming.
One last thought from the session: Maschenic of Verizon says that the momentum for healthcare change will come from the Millennial Generation and the youth who follow them. “The millennials want things fast, immediate and they don’t want to wait. If we don’t start the change ourselves, they will put pressure on us and force change on us.” Whoa. Better get moving.
–Contributed by Cindy Atoji, A Big Kid
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