Health care provider Humana delves into the mobile health market with its Colorfall iPhone mind game. Humana also plans to offer more iPhone health apps later this year. Meanwhile, Emerging Healthcare Solutions introduced a mobile app for 911 calls.
Health care provider
Humana is
targeting the mobile health market with its first iPhone application.
Produced with Persuasive Games, the $2.99 Colorfall application is now available
in the iPhone App Store and aims to keep the mind sharp. It involves fast
thinking to arrange the colors of the rainbow and allows players to shoot
iPhone images and incorporate them into the game.
"With Colorfall, it's a brain game in terms of cognitive fitness,"
Paul Puopolo, Humana's director of consumer innovation, told eWEEK. "You
really have to think about what you're doing with the squares."
Users can preview the company's games at the Web site for its
Humana Games division.
"We're excited to be the first health insurance company to offer people
fun, healthy mobile games that challenge their minds and bodies while encouraging
healthy behaviors," Puopolo, Humana's director of consumer innovation,
wrote in a statement.
Humana plans to release additional health applications for the iPhone this
summer.
As Humana releases Colorfall, more and more companies are introducing
health-related mobile applications.
On June 21, Emerging Healthcare Solutions (EHSI) announced a smartphone
application called e-911 that sends a user's medical information to a first
responder or emergency room when 911 is dialed. The e-911 will appear first on
Apple's iPhone, followed by Google Android and
Research in Motions' BlackBerry smartphone.
"We have established a goal of selling one million, e-911 downloads in
the first year after release," Cindy Morrissey, president of EHSI, wrote in
a statement. e-911 will be free on
EHSI's Website.
By providing essential information about a patients' medical condition or
medications automatically via a smartphone application, the patient will be
treated faster than if verbal communication was used, according to EHSI, Earlier in June,
Walgreens
announced a mobile alerts service to inform customers when their
prescriptions are ready and updated its iPhone application. In March, the
University
of Pittsburgh Medical Center announced a partnership with dbMotion to allow
doctors to access information on patients' allergies, medications and lab
results on BlackBerrys.
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