How smartphones are changing the face of mobile and participatory healthcare: an overview, with example from eCAALYX

More than half of Americans aged 25-29 now live in households with mobile phones but no traditional landline telephones, a December 2010 report on phone use by the US National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has found. The same study also found that the younger children are, the likelier they are to live in homes that only have wireless phones, suggesting that younger parents are becoming increasingly reliant on mobile phones even as they adjust from being single to a more settled family lifestyle [1]. According to a recent video report by Mobile Future, a Washington, D.C., broad-based coalition of businesses and non-profit organisations, there has been a massive increase in the numbers of consumer smartphone apps (applications) downloaded over the past two years, with figures going up from 300 million apps downloaded in 2009 to five billion in 2010 [2,3] (Figure 1).Indeed, smartphones have been one of the success stories of the last decade. In a relatively short period of time, smart mobile technology has penetrated significantly into society, capturing an entire age spectrum of subscribers in western industrialised nations, from school children to senior citizens. Such progress has built upon a long history of the use of communication devices, and a rapid adoption of mobile communication devices that began in the latter part of the last century.According to Traxler [4] such rapid uptake in mobile phone ownership has transformed many aspects of our lives, both in the Western world and just about everywhere else around the globe. It is impacting, he suggests, not only on the manner in which we communicate, but also on our sense of culture, community, identity and relationships. Although encounters via mobile telephony are generally briefer than face to face interactions, there is evidence that for young people in particular, the number of daily contacts through text messaging can be very high [5]. Many older peopl