February is the American Heart Month, a time when organizations and the entire healthcare industry dedicate their time to the heart disease awareness campaign. This year, they chose to use the mobile platform as a way to garner the attention of US citizens, while also creating innovative apps related to health that could potentially help users decrease their chances of heart disease or a heart attack.
Following this trend, Million Heart, a public-private collaboration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, created a challenge for its contenders to create a heart related app in a competition called the Risk Check Challenge. The winning mobile app, Heart Health Mobile, was developed by Wisconsin’s Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, which will help consumers assess their risk of heart attack or stroke and direct them to participating health screening locations in their community. It will be powered by Archimedes Inc.’s support tool, IndiGO, a support tool that helps users make medical decisions.
Rave Mobile Safety, the creators of Smart 911, also celebrated the American Month by using a similar mobile platform to jumpstart its campaign. Through its Smart 911 app, users are able to make a profile with all the information they want 9-1-1 to have during an emergency, such as their home address, phone number(s) or family contact information. This way, when a 9-1-1 call is placed, the user’s safety profile will automatically be delivered to the dispatcher.
But the importance of heart disease awareness is not just for the month of February. Harvard Medical School joined forces with Orca Health to create the HeartDecide App, which provides consumers with insider understandings of the heart’s function, problems that may occur and how to deal with certain conditions. The multisensory learning products go beyond just plain reminding a user to visit the doctor for yearly heart check-ups, but rather help patients fully understand their conditions to make informed healthcare decisions.
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease is still the number one cause of death in the US, which makes these new developments between technology and the medical field even more significant.
For more information about the Heart Health Mobile app, click here.
Edited by
Allison Boccamazzo
