Emerging mHealth innovations for patient self-management support

mHealth solutions enable connected patients to take care of their health and care needs while `on the move'. There exist a variety of emerging innovative technologies supporting them in their goal of symptoms tracking, medication adherence, or connecting with others, either peers suffering from the same disease or expert practitioners supervising the health status from away. In this article we first present and categorize some examples of such technologies for performance maximization, health maintenance, disease prevention and disease management. Then we discuss these technologies in terms of their design space supporting the patient's self-care, supporting the peer efforts in care, or supporting the patient-practitioner interaction. We discuss the technologies' strengths and weaknesses in terms of the barriers for adoption and scaling. We especially focus on discussion on the evidence of mHealth as an intervention, for its safety, efficiency, efficacy and effectiveness and provide some guidelines for future work areas to be completed, such that evidence can be provided with a sufficient power and emerging mHealth technologies can enable the support for patient health self-management.