Taking Health Gobal and Mobile

During the Mobile Edge event held at Microsoft in Lisbon I spoke about innovations and mobile health. Being the last speaker for the event, as usual attendees were tired, eager to get to the cocktails or go home… so to make it interesting I shortened my presentation. Having said that there some valuable insights.

If we look at today’s world… Almost every person on the planet has some form of a mobile device. We demand immediate information, anywhere.. Including those related to health. So if we feel strange or feel ill we look to the web or the net for answers, immediate diagnosis in that case, and in most cases we get wrong information.

After visiting a medical practitioner,  Doctors would like to stay in touch to make sure our health issues are being addressed and most medical practitioners want to ensure that medications given are taken properly and are effectively.

In fact today there are more than 100,000 mhealth related applications available on public application stores and in the US alone there were 247 million people who have downloaded  an  mhealth app in 2013 alone.

However most mHealth app today are based on wearable and fitness devices

Mobile Health  is a very fast growing economy on its own and projected to be around 58B US$ by 2020 for applications alone. A small piece of the health industry which is projected to be around 6T US$ at that same time.

mHealth is such a hot topics these days that even Google and Apple have joined in...

Considering that wearables alone will be worth around 12B US$ by 2018

However in the future it will no longer be wearables that will drive mHealth, it will be the need for actual medical care.

And this is due to huge savings on the way medical care is provided to a growing population, a population that is demands real time and increasingly mobile.

Hence some countries already have taken advantage of this opportunity. Take the Medicon Valley as an example, it is being geared to the the next version of Silicon Valley in the medical field. The Öresunds region which encompasses Southern Sweden and Denmark will soon no longer be called Öresund even by locals...

but will be known as Medicon Valley.

In this region, today, you will find the largest concentration of life science companies and organizations... Most if not all are already having their own mHealth app...

• 80 biotech companies
• 20 pharma companies
• 100 medtech companies
• 7 science parks with a significant focus on life science
• 6 incubators, of which 3 have a significant focus on life science
• 80 contract research organizations and contract manufacturing organizations
• 40,000 employees in the private life science sector
• 12 universities, 5 of which supply life science related educations                 
• 32 hospitals, of which 11 are university hospitals

So the question is do you want to join this massive wave and revolutionize health by  making it truly mobile…  and global? How do we help those who need medical care but can not afford it?

Along the foot steps of facebook and silicon valley

Facebook's IPO is the current talk of the town. It even set its own price for its shares which most analyst think is undervalued never the less Mark Zuckerberg will pocket a cool 1 B$ and his shares will be worth more than 17.6B$. A very good pay off after a few years. There's no questions how great Facebook has become can even afford to snub bankers putting Silicon Valley over Manhattan.

Looking at this achievement and how it comes about is not to look within Facebook itself but in a grander scale, Silicon Valley the playground of large tech companies, exciting start-ups and most importantly industry collaboration. So why are successful tech companies in Silicon Valley? Being part of a cluster initiative in Sweden, Mobile Heights we try to emulate the success of Silicon Valley. However there is something in Silicon Valley not present in the Oresund's region, a trait, a very simple one... Inclusivity. The culture of ensuring everyone is included and involved, until Sweden and Denmark acquires this trait it will never emulate Silicon Valley, and I stand by that word.

In Sweden, Denmark and the rest of Western Europe, it's never about inclusivity, rather its about exclusivity. This is ingrained in the culture and very difficult to change. To emulate Silicon Valley inclusivity must start from the onset, from the schools, from the home so the next generation will have this trait as they embark on the journey to future of financial success.

Let's take my daughter as an example, who grew up in a typical Western European environment who had her birthday months ago but will have her birthday party together with her current best friend in the coming weeks. They were listing who should they invite and all I heard was why they should not invite her friends she used to play with and their mothers actually encourage them not to since its a lot of work to have more children in a party. Recently she complained she was not invited on another friend's birthday party. If you have not picked up what I wanted to say, here it is. From childhood, Western European children are encouraged to be exclusive and not inclusive. This carries on all the way to business where it is never inclusive, that's why Silicon Valley will stand on its pedestal for a considerable period of time.

I believe that if we want to change that and be inclusive it must start from the most basic institution, the home and family. We must practice what we preach and have our children embrace being inclusive... only then can we truly claim we have set the real foundations towards emulating Silicon Valley's success.