MHealth

The term “mHealth” is one being used to help define a category of medical services and devices and a growing part of the health care industry. It stands most simply for mobile health care, more fully “emerging mobile communications and network technology for healthcare.”

This market encompasses the use of mobile techology in the service of providing health care. It includes all those applications which combine body sensors with mobile or static devices designed to monitor a patient’s vital signs or some specific bodily function. The infrastructure behind these devices is also part of the category. An example of such a device is an electrode patch which may be worn by a patient and automatically send the monitoring center information about the patient while he or she is on-the-go. The information is sent by a tiny radio transmitter build into the epidurmal electronic device.

Today’s market size is the estimated size of the market for mHealth products in 2010 and a forecast for the size in 2014. Please note, however, that this market has yet to be well defined and as a result various research firms have come up with widely disparate projections of its size. The source listed below provides a link to an article explaining this problem more fully, titled “mHealth predictions: $1.9B, $4.4B, $4.6B?” Defining the market is key!

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2010 and a forecast for 2014
Market size: $1.5 and $4.6 Billion respectively
Source: “Market Size Projections for mHealth and Wireless Health”, Wireless Health Strategies, March 19, 2010, available online here.
Original source: CSMG, a division of TMBG Global
Posted on September 06, 2011

Automatic Patient Lift Equipment Market

The United States represents almost half (45.4%) of the world demand for this sort of hospital equipment, followed by the United Kingdom with 18.6%, Germany with 11.3% and France with 6.2%. Companies in the business of producing this equipment, among their offerings, include Arjo/Huntleigh, Joerns, Invacare, Stryker, and HRC.

Geographic reference: World
Year: 2009
Market size: $490 Million
Source: Gregory N. Miller, “Jeffries 3rd Annual Healthcare Conference,” June 17, 2009
Original Source: Hill-Rom Services Inc.