The Emerging Role of Mobile Phones in Health

Always available remote physiologic monitoring through wearable sensors brings the transformational possibility of health care that empowers patients to conduct self-care, and making self-monitoring a lifelong process. Patients can more effectively manage chronic diseases, as well as, screening for conditions could occur much sooner. It also fundamentally shifts and shares responsibility and creates a true partnership between clinician and patient. Beyond the individual patient, it also creates the potential for population health management in a way that has not been possible before. Shwetak Patel argues the smartphone will play a central role in this vision to a point where the phones themselves will provide many of these physiologic sensing capabilities. In his talk, he will describe a set of projects where it is already possible to conduct clinically relevant health diagnostics using just the sensors already present on a smartphone.