Top iPhone Apps For Health Pros, Patients

Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch aren't just for entertainment and productivity. Healthcare pros can use them to improve treatment for their patients, and individuals can use them to get healthy and stay healthy.

The App Store has an entire category devoted to Healthcare & Fitness, with myriad entries. We've highlighted apps to help healthcare pros with diagnosis and treatment, and to help individuals with diet, exercise, weight loss, diabetes, and other health issues.

We'll also look at a couple of general-purpose productivity apps that can be very useful in healthcare regimens, and take a quick peek at how the apps that come free with the iPhone and Touch can help individuals take better care of themselves.

Epocrates
Epocrates Inc.
Cost: Free

Epocrates lets healthcare pros access information on thousands of drugs, including doses, adverse reactions, formularies, pricing, and images of pills. It can check drug interactions for up to 30 drugs at a time. Epocrates also includes a number of medical calculators. For instance the Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator uses a ratio of weight-to-height used to gauge obesity, and the Glomerular Filtration Rate (GFR) calculator measures stages of kidney disease.

Healthcare pros can upgrade to a premium version on the Web, providing access to in-depth, peer-reviewed clinical content on diseases, an infectious disease treatment guide, references on lab tests, and information on herbal and over-the-counter remedies.

AllOne Mobile
AllOne Mobile Corp.
Cost: Free

AllOne Mobile is a service for healthcare providers and insurance companies. It's designed to allow those companies to give their individual members access to their own health records. The iPhone app allows users to access this information remotely, and coordinate those records with healthcare providers and health plans. Users can make corrections on their own records, and also share records with new doctors. Users can also use the app to confirm insurance coverage, list people to contact in an emergency, fax information to a doctor's office or any other fax number from their mobile phone, and more.

Users can download a general version of the app. AllOne also has private-label versions available in partnership with Microsoft HealthVault, BlueCross of Northeastern Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Army.

Calorie Tracker
LiveStrong Demand Media Inc.
Cost: $2.99

People following the popular LiveStrong health and fitness program will like this calorie-tracking app. Use it to look up nutritional information on the food you're about to eat, and keep track of daily calories, fat, carbs, and protein using the service's Daily Plate database. Also use Calorie Tracker to log calories burned by exercise. The app is a companion to LiveStrong's free Web service, with two-way synch, but the app works even when you're offline.

Weight Watchers Mobile
Weight Watchers International
Cost: $29.95 sign-up, plus $16.95 per month

The 46-year-old behemoth-among-weight-loss programs recently released an iPhone app, allowing users to track food and exercise, search food options, find nearby meetings, and calculate nutrition and exercise value based on Weight Watchers' trademarked "points" system.

The app won't win many new converts to Weight Watchers. It requires a network connection, and, while the app itself is free, it requires a Weight Watchers subscription to work, and the subscription is pricey.

Still, the app is potentially a valuable tool for iPhone and iPod Touch users who are already "on program."

soundAMP
Ginger Labs
Cost: $9.99

soundAMP turns your iPhone into a hearing aid. It's designed for students looking for a hearing boost in a lecture hall, and hearing-impaired people looking to participate in conversations.

The software amplifies soft sounds and softens loud sounds, providing clarity at all volume levels with minimal distortion, the vendor says. It uses the iPhone's built-in microphone for input. On-screen controls let you adjust the volume and modify the tone, and the software even works like a TiVo for real life -- a "repeat" button lets you play back what was just said.

Now hear this: While the App Store rating gives soundAMP a good overall rating, three out of five stars, nine of the 18 reviews are one-stars, with seven five-star reviews. However, the vendor says that it recently released a new version, it's popular among the hearing disabled, and Apple itself is promoting the app.

iFitness
Hooman Zohoor
Cost: $1.99

iFitness is a personal trainer that fits in the palm of your hand; it provides pictures, videos, and instructions for how to do over 230 exercises, sorted by body region and target muscle. The software lets you choose a target, tap an exercise, and get a picture of the exercise. Double-tap to flip the image and view text instructions. The app also provides video instruction for more difficult exercises. Users can create different custom workout lists for different days, add custom exercises, and track progress.

Islet
Michael Connor
Cost: $2.99

Islet is a diabetes management app that lets users record blood glucose readings, carb intake, insulin injections, and exercise, and e-mail results to a healthcare pro, parent, or anyone else. Users can view and edit all database entries, navigating by month, filter by date, time, or value, and export as comma-separated records for easy import to Excel. The app displays graphs of high, low, and average readings for a variety of data. The developer, a Princeton undergrad, recently received a $100,000 grant to continue developing the app.

Good Food Near You
Global Fitness Media
Cost: Free

Everybody eating a controlled diet has this problem at one time or another: You're out on the road, you didn't plan your next meal, but you're hungry and you have to eat. You need something fast and convenient -- but "fast and convenient" usually means "unhealthy junk food." What do you do?

Good Food Near You solves that problem. It provides a list of nearby fast-food and family dining locations, where you can get a fast, healthy meal.

I tested it out by searching near my home, it successfully located the neighborhood Subway, Marie Callender's and Denny's, and suggested healthy food on the menu for each.

Good Food Near You is far from perfect. For example, the very first choice it gave me wasn't a restaurant at all -- it was the nearby florist, which does not actually provide healthy food choices unless you are a cow. Also, at the local 7-Eleven, it suggested a jelly donut as a healthy food choice, and at Starbucks, a cinnamon raisin bagel.

You have to go through the app's list of suggestions, and throw out the garbage--and there'll be a lot of garbage.

Also, the database is thin, and it's pretty much limited to fast-food places. You won't find that darling little Asian-fusion place that just opened up the street with the delicious vegetarian menu.

Still, if you're caught on unfamiliar territory, and you need to get something to eat fast, and you want to eat healthy, Good Food Near You will help you. And it's free. Just don't expect too much.

MotionX GPS Sport / Sport Lite
Fullpower Technologies
Cost: Free/$2.99

I use GPS Sport for a pretty simple purpose: I walk for exercise outdoors most days. GPS Sport tracks how far, how fast, and how long I've gone, so I can keep track of calories burned. I don't use it every time I walk outdoors, just every couple of weeks to get a status update.

But GPS Sport does a lot more than that: It draws a map of routes, using street, topo/terrain and satellite maps. You can e-mail your track to multiple recipients, post photos, share information on Facebook and Twitter, and access and control your iPod music directly.

If you're looking to use GPS Sport the same way I do, the free Lite version should be fine for you. It stores up to three waypoints, and a single track. If you want to stretch your geeky fitness muscles, go for the paid version, which stores up to 303 waypoints and 101 tracks.

Weightbot
Tapbots
Cost: $1.99

Weightbot keeps track of your weight. The software lets you enter your weight every time you weigh yourself, set your goal, keep track of progress toward your goal, and view your BMI. It tracks your average weekly and monthly weight loss or gain and shows units in pounds or kilograms. Weightbot even lets shy persons password-protect their weight information.

You could do all this just using the iPhone's built-in software, but Weightbot is a fun little app. It makes nifty clicking and creaking noises as you work it, as though it had a clockwork mechanism doing the calculations for you. It's fun, and it only costs two bucks, so give it a go.

Lose It!
FitNow
Cost: Free

One of the most important thing you can do to lose weight is to keep a food journal, writing down every single bite of food or drink that passes your lips. That's what Lose It is for, it's a food journaling app that also helps you track calories, nutrients, and calories burned during exercise.

Enter your current weight, how much you want to lose, and your activity level, and Lose It gives you the total number of net calories you need to eat each day to achieve your goal. It's easy to enter foods and exercise when you're on the go, as well as update your weight over time.

Lose It is far from perfect. The food database is pretty bad; I find it to be very incomplete. Instead of using the database, I get nutritional information from food packaging or on the Internet (often using the iPhone's built-in browser) and enter calories manually; Lose It makes that easy to do, and once you've entered a food item once, Lose It makes it easy to re-use it for a later meal.

Likewise, the weight-history data in Lose It is weak; you can't look up what you weighed last week or last month. On the other hand, Lose It does provide you with a nice-looking line chart to show your progress losing or gaining weight over time. I use Weightbot as well as an Excel spreadsheet on my desktop to track more detailed information.

The best tool isn't the perfect tool, it's the tool you actually use. Despite Lose It's problems, it's the most useful health and fitness app that I've found and it may be the most useful iPhone app, period. With Lose It's help, I've lost 28 pounds since March. 63 more pounds to go!

Documents To Go
DataViz Inc.
Cost: $9.99

Documents To Go isn't a healthcare app, it's a general-purpose productivity program. But exercise programs, diets, and other healthcare routines require record-keeping, and that's where DocsToGo comes in. The software lets you edit, create, and view Microsoft Word and Excel spreadsheets on your iPhone, and synch them to your desktop.

Use those documents to track your weight, exercise programs, keep a food journal, and more. Professional race car driver Charlie Kimball controls his diabetes by keeping records in an Excel spreadsheet template designed by his doctors, which he synchs to his desktop using Docs to Go and e-mails to his doctor.

Simplenote
Codality Inc.
Cost: $1.99

Another general-purpose app that can be applied to healthcare record-keeping, Simplenote is similar to the iPhone's built-in Notes app. The major difference: Simplenote synchs to a Web application, while the Notes app requires Apple Mail on the Mac, or Outlook on Windows. Simplenote also has a different font and background color than Notes.

Native Apps

Don't overlook the iPhone's built-in apps, which are standard when you buy the device:

Consumer electronics have had a huge role in making Americans unhealthy; we work all day at computers, rather than outside moving around, and then we come home and sit and watch TV or play electronic games. Using the iPhone, consumer electronics can be used to push back, and put back on the road to good health.

For Further Reading:
Top iPhone Healthcare Apps

iPhone Apps Help Pro Car Racer Control Diabetes

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