Personalised mobile health and fitness apps: lessons learned from myFitnessCompanion®.

Smartphones and tablets are slowly but steadily changing the way we look after our health and fitness. Today, many high quality mobile apps are available for users and health professionals and cover the whole health care chain, i.e. information collection, prevention, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. Our team has developed a mobile health and fitness app called myFitnessCompanion® which has been available via Android market since February 2011. The objective of this paper is to share our experience with rolling out a mobile health and fitness app. We discuss the acceptance of health apps by end-users and healthcare industry. We discuss how mobile health apps will be distributed in the near future, the use of Personal Health Record (PHR) systems such as Microsoft HealthVault and the impact of regulations (FDA) on the future of mobile health apps. The paper is based on seven years of experience by the authors as mobile health and fitness application developers and we discuss the challenges and opportunities for app developers in the health industry.