Most often the painful part of being diagnosed with a permanent illness is the idea of coping up with it on your own. There is much to consider when it comes to health care management on a regular basis, depending on the diagnosis, patients may have moderate to extreme difficulty managing it all on their own.
Enter myHealthPal, founded by a Parkinson’s patient himself, Mike Barlow brings out an App that will change the way you monitor your health.
myHealthPal is an app that provides a reliable support structure for patients especially those suffering from Parkinson’s disease. It enables patients to take control over their situation, and eliminates the everyday stress of battling the disease. The App is only available for iOS users right now, is based on five core ideas:
○ Taking control of your health
○ Tracking your symptoms and conditions
○ Keeping your loved ones in the know
○ Connecting with experts
○ Helping others going through the same
myHealthPal – visualise your health:
So what does this App really help the user with? For starters the dashboard itself has alerts and notifications on for medication, and charts on how they are progressing through the day. The users can get aggregated information of all their routine and information all in one place. They can have a quick summary of their health. The App enables users to track their symptoms and conditions, which is great since patients of Parkinson’s tend to not recall such information over time. Apart from their direct medical information, the App also helps in logging mood, diet, exercise and other such data.
All of this data is graphically represented for easy reading. This not only would help the patient himself but also the doctor in following-up with the patients’ condition. This makes it the ‘powerful digital companion’ for those suffering from long-term health conditions like Parkinsons disease. Caretakers too can use this App to keep a tab on their loved ones.
MyHealthPal helps users by aggregating all of their data and information in one place. The app allows users to track symptoms. Users can also log their mood, diet and exercise information and virtually anything else that may affect the user’s quality of life.
This app isn’t like any ordinary health tracking app. What makes is unique is that the owner himself knows what it is like to be a patient, and the everyday issues that come with it. Barlow has a dynamic and philanthropic vision with this App. myHealthPal is designed in such a way that it can donate the information of the user for research, which helps in understanding the disease. The users in turn receive their contribution in shared revenue. Barlow has also been working with health institutes and charities to further expand this app. The app in particular has been testes at Mount Sinai Hospital (New York).
Such apps that have a wide scope are essential and very apt for our growing needs. Technological advancement that helps in solving problems are the way to go in our times. The issue that may arise would be the patient ability to use the App. Parkinsons patients lose control over their limbs, and other diseases that restrict body movement would be impractical for this App. Maybe audio commands, increased availability to Android users, advanced data back-up options would help keep the purpose of the App alive.
