moodspin inc.

American Heart Assn.'s Pocket First Aid and CPR app. (Jive Media) |By Francesca Lunzer Kritz, Special to the Los Angeles Times "Is there an app for that?" When it comes to consumer healthcare applications for smart phones, the answer, increasingly, is yes. There are now close to 6,000 consumer health apps, according to a review published in March by mobihealthnews, which reports on the mobile health industry, and more are being added every day. Many are free, or cost $1 to $10 to download. Some physicians are concerned about the reliability of the medical information provided by many of these apps, which offer advice and information on a wide array of health topics, including how to find a doctor, first aid for an emergency and exercise instructions. And they worry that consumers could follow an app's guidance for, say, monitoring high blood pressure, and leave it at that — forgoing visits with their physician. "The consumer health app market is still a very immature market with a lot of things being thrown out there," says Kevin Patrick, an adjunct professor of family and preventive medicine at UC San Diego and the editor of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Patrick also says that generally the apps have not been subjected to clinical trials that would show that they are effective in changing health behaviors, a claim of much of the marketing surrounding some health apps. For now, there's little objective vetting when it comes to medical and health apps. "Consumers are largely on their own; there is no organization that is policing, monitoring, or rating things like medical accuracy and consumer friendliness," says Dr. Joseph Kim, a physician and the founder and blogger for several websites, including medicalsmartphones.com. "Type 'diabetes' into an app-store search engine, you can find a huge list of apps, but you have no way of knowing which ones are good and which you should avoid, and as a result, consumers may download apps that contain erroneous information," he says. (He advises discussing apps you're considering with a healthcare professional you trust.) Apple has far and away the most health apps; close to 80% work on iPhones only, according to the recent mobihealthnews report. The Android platform has about 500, and BlackBerry and Palm somewhat fewer. But the apps business is changing fast, says Claudia Tessier, president of the mHealth Initiative in Boston, which tracks the mobile health Read More

Moodspin, a very eccentric social-networking add-on service has just had its app (link opens in iTunes) approved on the App Store. In case you're unfamiliar with the site, it currently works only on Twitter, and lets you very quickly broadcast how you're feeling to the people who follow you. But here's the catch: it's not just text, the service goes in and makes small changes to your profile icon, adding that same mood-related emoticon to your photo, which in turn lets others see what you're feeling no matter what you just tweeted. Is this useful? In the grand scheme of things, not at all. What's interesting though, is how it tracks that data back on Moodspin.com. Each time you update your mood status it's charted on a timeline, which if you're actively using the site, will show others what you were up to at various parts of the day. Each mood selection is also represented on your daily mood graph which you can compare to just your friends, or everyone else on the Moodspin service. As an iPhone app Moodspin's initial offering is relatively simple, letting you select your mood in three taps, which can be fired off as a personalized update to Twitter. If there's enough room, it also (annoyingly) tacks on a URL to your Moodspin profile so that others can see what you've been brooding about posted as moods during the past 24 hours. There is however, no way to track your past moods from the app itself, something I'm told is coming in the next big update. In the meantime, a version of the service which is due later this month will be implementing Facebook status messages and mood changes to user's Facebook profile photos which tend to be quite a bit bigger than Twitter's. However, there it will compete with a myriad of other mood apps that have existed since the launch of the Facebook apps platform. Moodspin's iPhone app lets you set your mood in a couple of taps, the result of which is a new tweet and Twitter profile picture. Read More