My love affair with my iPhone continues and the thing I am enjoying most about it is the apps store. (`Apps' is shorthand for `Applications', for the un-initiated.) The sheer volume and variety of apps available to download to your iPhone is incredible. They range from free games to software that allows you to read MRIs, and many are being heavily promoted in recent television advertising.

Currently my personal favorites are iFitness and World Countries. The World Countries app covers 238 countries and provides large sized maps, flags, demographic and geographic information, details about the government and economy, transportation and the military - a mini encyclopedia at your finger tips when you are travelling!

 But it was the iFitness app that fired my imagination and had me thinking about how these applications could be developed to help patients with chronic disease. With specifically designed mobile phone applications patients could track and monitor their disease throughout the day. Take the example of a patient suffering with chronic pain - they would be able to record their pain levels at set times during the day.  A pre-programmed alert would remind the patient to record their pain level and quality of life score, which can later be recorded and plotted over time, building up a comprehensive picture. This would provide powerful information for the patient and their doctor to better manage their disease. It's a short jump to then consider applications for other chronic disease areas, like rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes and asthma. 

The ZEST digital team has developed applications that allow patients to track and monitor their disease that are housed on websites. It's a relatively short leap to move that technology to hand held devices and given the huge public adoption of web enabled mobile products I predict we'll be launching our first patient support app in the next 12 months Watch this space!