Apps for smartphones

The Mobile World Congress opened the doors yesterday in Barcelona, this year with special attention in smartphone apps. Healthcare apps. are gaining importance and relevance in the sector and I’m sure they will surprise us with many novelties this 2012. To celebrate, I’ll share with you some of my favourite health apps.

Sleep Cycle

This app will help you wake up when your body is ready to. While you sleep you enter different states of deep sleep and light sleep, this app monitors your movements through the iPhone’s accelerometer to determine in which stage of sleep you are in. When you go to bed you set an alarm to wake you up in a specific time frame (for example, from 7:00 to 7:30 am) and the alarm will go off when you are in the light sleep phase.

Cardiograph

Cardiograph measures your heart rate through your iPhone. It stores all history and you can access it anytime and share your results online or with your doctor. If you have several IOS 5.0 devices, they synchronize information.

Vital Signs Camera

Vital Signs Camera is an app that analyses you face colour changes (micro-blushes) to measure your heart rate through the iPhone camera. It also measures your breathing controlling the movements in your chest. The results appear in colours green-yellow-red (low-average-high) based on statistics for adult male in rest from the American Heart Association, and for breathing based on the works of Carloine Bunker Rosdahl, Mary T. Kowalsky and the Manual of Nursing. Just like the previous one, data is stored and you can access your history when you please. It can read up to two people at the same time.

FoodScanner & Meal Snap (by DailyBurn)

FoodScanner

There are a few apps similar to FoodScanner. This app allows you to calorie count through the barcode of the product you are going to eat. This makes calorie count easy and fast to help you control your intake during the week.

Meal Snap

Another calorie counter. To count the calories of the plate that is in front of you just snap a picture of it and the app will identify the food and will give you an approximate amount of calories. You will choose the portion size. Unfortunately it seems to be a bit bugged with complex meals in its current version, but I thought it was interesting to put it on my list because it is a great and easy way to control your nutrition and I hope it can work in the future.

Mole Detective 2

Interesting app that controls the state and evolution of a mole to determine if it can be a melanoma. Created by dermatologists it’s in my list as it’s a great app to empower the patient. It keeps a history of the mole evolution with the pictures you take so it can be quite useful for the doctor.

Runastic

Is one of my favourite apps to encourage running, although it also supports cycling, swimming, walking and others. It follows your route, measure time, velocity and rhythm through the GPS; plus in the end you get a summary of your session with the approximate number of calories burned, interval of the workout and average heart rate. It has a workout diary in which you can see your progress. It also has several other fun «stuff» like you can see other friends who are currently running and send them a little voice message to encourage them (max. 5 secs).