Emerging New Era of Mobile Health Technologies

direct and indirect healthcare costs through reduction of the need for healthcare clinic visits or hospitalization [7,8]. Regarding mHealth, there is an international conference, “mHealth Summit”, which was renamed “the Connected Health Conference” in 2015. The 8th international conference will be held from December 11 to 14, 2016 in Washington D.C. [9]. Although the meeting will deal with various subjects regarding information and technology, the title of the conference reflects that mHealth is important in modern healthcare settings and industries. In the meeting, various ideas, new technologies, and some case study results will be presented and incorporated into performance workshops in front of many potential guests and consumers in order to show their excellent ideas. New technology armed with new ideas should be encouraged to be developed further and there are many areas that are undeveloped and yet to be developed as a “Blue Ocean” [10]. They should be used for good healthcare practices and to decrease healthcare costs. Although mHealth has a growing market share and rosy prospects, there are several issues or challenges to be clearly defined and clarified. First, there is a difficulty in differentiating whether the devices utilized in mHealth implementation are considered as medical devices or some other wellness equipment or health products. For developers and the individual users of mhealth devices, we need to define the differences between medical mHealth systems and other health monitoring systems. It would be great to see a new definition of mHealth that incorporates their differences. Second, mHealth requires solid evidence-based mHealth outcomes. It is necessary to investigate the impacts of mHealth on health and healthcare improvement through empirical data with sound research methods. The findings would help the implementation of new technology dispersed into healthEmerging New Era of Mobile Health Technologies