Monitoring Your Health With Mobile Devices

The smartphone will be a sensor that will help people take better control of their health by tracking it with increasing precision.

“The Creative Destruction of Medicine” lays out Dr. Eric Topol’s vision for how people will start running common medical tests, skipping office visits and sharing their data with people other than their physicians. Dr. Topol, a cardiologist at the Scripps Medical Institute, is already seeing signs of this as companies find ways to hook medical devices to the computing power of smartphones. Devices to measure blood pressure, monitor blood sugar, hear heartbeats and chart heart activity are already in the hands of patients. More are coming. He acknowledges that some doctors are skeptical of these devices. “Of course, the medical profession doesn’t like D.I.Y. anything,” he said. “There are some really progressive digital doctors who are recognizing the opportunities here for better care and prevention, but most are resistant to change.”