Analysis of the Innovation Outputs in mHealth for Patient Monitoring

In the last decade, mobile health (mHealth) has developed as a natural consequence of the advances in mobile technologies, the growing spread of mobile devices, and their application in the provision of novel health services. mHealth has demonstrated the potential to make the health care sector more efficient and sustainable and to increase the healthcare quality. Considering the boost to the healthcare area which will be provided by mHealth, many organizations and governments have engaged in innovating in this area. In this context, this work investigated the role of innovation in the area of mHealth for patient monitoring in order to determine the trends and the performance of the innovation activities in this domain. Proxy indicators, like intellectual property statistics and scientific publication statistics, were utilized to measure the outputs of innovation during the period of time from 2006 to 2015 in Europe. Two studies were performed to provide quantitative measures for the indicators measuring innovation outputs in the domain of mHealth for patient monitoring and three main conclusions were observed. First, even if there was a lot of research in Europe in mHealth for patient monitoring, the vast majority of the enterprises did not protect their inventions. Second, a strong research collaboration in the area of mHealth for patient monitoring took place between researchers affiliated to institutions of different European countries and even with researchers working in Asian or American institutions. Finally, an increasing trend on the number of published articles about mHealth for patient monitoring was identified. Therefore, the findings of the studies demonstrated the great interest that has arisen the field of mHealth and the huge involvement in innovation activities in the area of mHealth for patient monitoring.