The Atkins Diet is one of the most popular of its kind around, and the diet that focuses strongly on the curtailing of carbs now has a little something extra to back it up.
Launching today, the Atkins Carb Tracker App looks to provide practitioners of the Atkins Diet with a little extra help in not only finding those pesky carbs, but also removing them. With this release, Atkins joins a growing number of apps, services and products in general in a steadily growing mobile health market.
The Atkins Carb Tracker App offers up a wide variety of tools for those looking to keep carbs under control, including a food search system that can be tied into the camera on a standard smartphone, allowing it to serve as a bar code scanner to identify the foods on grocery store shelves and present more information about them.
Additionally, there's a daily planner function that allows users to either have a plan presented to them or customize their own meal plan, a progress tracker which does pretty much what the name implies, a dining out guide for those special events and a phase overview in which the system can adapt according to what phase of the diet a user is in and present food choices accordingly. Atkins dieters will even receive help and support from a larger overall community, including access to over 1,600 low-carb recipes for users.
But the larger Atkins community is only a tiny part of a much, much larger field – the mobile health market.
Recent reports have suggested that the mobile health market will reach fully $11.8 billion by 2018, and given that the mobile health market in 2011 represented just $1.2 billion, that represents a major jump indeed. Additionlly, Frost & Sullivan not too long ago released numbers saying that back in 2011, there were just 17,000 total apps for smartphones and tablets in general, but by the end of this year, that number is certain to exceed that by a fairly wide margin.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the mobile health market is that it's seeing such a broad use base emerging. Mobile health apps aren't just being downloaded and used at the professional level – though there's plenty of traffic in that market. They're also being downloaded and used by regular people, just like with the Atkins Carb Tracker App. Naturally, just downloading an app alone won't improve user health and well-being, but the use of said apps, along with the accordant adjustments in behavior, will make much more of an impact in health levels than without.
Mobile health care devices and tools like apps are gaining ground; with the smartphone becoming a larger part of peoples' lives with every passing day, it stands to reason that the use of mobile health apps will gain with them. We're seeing that right now with the Atkins Carb Tracker App, and we're likely to see it even more as we enter 2013 and beyond.
Edited by
Allison Boccamazzo
