On Secure Mobile Health Devices and a Better Future for Us All

[Commentary] As the US, Africa, and the world embrace wireless wide area networks and secure mobile communications, so too does the possibility of mobile health. Mobile health is tremendously important anywhere where direct access to healthcare is limited, whether it is in rural US county or a remote township along the Western Cape of South Africa.

The Federal Communications Commission recently had a mHealth event focusing on mobile health technologies. Secure mobile health devices can monitor long-term medical therapies, population public health, or individual vital signs over a prolonged period are also on the horizon. Telemedicine can now be provided to the public at large, and public health practitioners have the biliary to access large amounts of important epidemiological data in near real-time. Such a future requires us to ensure that these secure mobile health devices protect individual privacy, civil liberties, and security of personal information. Secure mobile health devices, as well as the wireless manner in which such information is shared, need to have these protections "baked-in" by design. We need to ensure individuals have full control of what data is, and is not, shared on their health. We also need to think about not just transmission of information, but the transmission of designs to mass fabricate medical devices too. When you include in our future the ability to send, by wire or wireless transmission, designs for medical devices that can be printed by a 3-D printer locally -- for example a customized brace, splint, or other physical therapy -- the future of secure mobile health really becomes exciting. The approaches and secure mobile devices to accomplish such a future will come via multi-stakeholder, three-way dialogue among the general public, the private sector, and concerned members of the public sector. Secure mobile health devices developed and licensed in the US can and will benefit the world as well. These pioneering inventions will come from the innovations of health companies, dot-coms, universities, public-private partnerships, potentially even garage hobbyists working together. Maybe, right now in garages somewhere, we have several budding future "Steve Jobs" and "Bill Gates" of secure mobile health?