By David Haddad, program manager of Open mHealth

This week, as a member of the Open mHealth team, I will be at the mHealth Summit to showcase our work enabling integrated mHealth solutions that patients and providers can use to track and improve their health. At a special panel session, we will hear from two patients about how they have used integrated mHealth technology to manage their health.

One of those patients is Alex Freeman, who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 4 and is now a pediatric acute care nurse at UCLA’s Mattel Children’s Hospital. Before the event, I spoke with Alex about her experiences using mHealth to manage her diabetes. The data integration allows her to pull in weight, blood glucose, and insulin data from a number of different mHealth self-service resources, such as:

• Entra and the Qualcomm, for tracking blood glucose and weight, via the 2Net cloud integration
• RunKeeper, for tracking exercise
• PAM for tracking mood
• BodyMedia for sleep data and calorie counting
• ohmage for integrating data

Over the past seven years, Project HealthDesign supported 14 dedicated research teams in devising fascinating ways to use mobile technology to broaden the patient-provider dialogue and empower patients to manage their health outside of the clinical setting.

In this “tell us your story” feature, National Program Director Patricia Flatley Brennan discusses how through grantees’ work and collaboration, they came to the simple but powerful conclusion that some of the richest and most essential information about people’s health isn’t found at a clinic or hospital: it’s found in their personal attention to the details of their own lives.

By David Haddad, program manager of Open mHealth

Next week, Pioneer grantee Open mHealth will showcase its work during the 2012 mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C. at a panel with co-founder Deborah Estrin on Monday and an “Open mHealth” special session on Tuesday.

What Is an Open Architecture?

Open architecture is software with source code that is freely available to developers to promote cooperation and interoperability (as opposed to proprietary and copyrighted software). This means developers can more quickly and effectively work together to create optimized mHealth applications.

What Is Open mHealth, and Why Is It Important?

Nine out of 10 people on the planet own a cell phone—making it more common than owning a car, radio, or television. Mobile health (mHealth) apps are increasingly popular—with one in five smartphone users having a health app. We can use apps on our phones to help us stay healthy. Apps like epocrates allow us to find health information and learn about medicine; other apps can help us collect and share data about our health with our health care providers.

By the Open mHealth team

Note: This was cross-posted from the Open mHealth blog.

Open mHealth is proud to announce that we’re going to the 2012 mHealth Summit on December 3-5, in Washington, D.C. We’re going to be showcasing the power of integration using an open architecture across two disease domains—type 1 Diabetes and post-traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD). We’ll be co-hosting a booth with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and 12 different technical partners, which represents a new level of collaboration in mHealth.

We’ve partnered with, and will be featuring, at the Summit: Alex Freeman (a patient with type 1 diabetes), Brian Venerick (a veteran with PTSD), Bodymedia, Runkeeper, Greendot Diabetes, Entra, Qualcomm Life’s 2Net, the Interaction Design Lab at Cornell University, Kaiser Permanente, Intel, Microsoft’s Health Vault, Ginger.io, Veteran Affairs’ National Center for PTSD, and Ohmage.

Amanda E. Staiano, PhD, MPP, Research Fellow, Pennington Biomedical Research Center

Can video games help kids move more and even lose weight?  Long blamed for promoting an unhealthy, sedentary lifestyle, video games are gaining a new reputation—by offering opportunities for enhanced physical activity.

Exergames, which are video games that require physical exertion, are popular among children and adults alike. The Children’s Digital Media Center at Georgetown University received a grant from Health Games Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to investigate the game design principles that might make exergames effective physical activity and weight loss tools. Professor Sandra Calvert of the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University served as the principal investigator and was joined by myself and Dr. Anisha Abraham of Georgetown University Medical Center as co-investigators.  The exciting results were recently published online in the journal Obesity.