More than 500 senior decision makers from across the areas of lifestyle apps and services will take part in an upcoming mobile health forum in Dubai.

Connected World Forum will run from October 31 to November 3.

“There are already over 100 live mobile money deployments globally, and many more mobile healthcare programmes are being launched successfully around the world from Boston to Bengaluru,” said Andrea Monteiro, director of the Connected World Forum.

“There is a huge interest and market among consumers for mobile services in the money, health, education and agricultural sectors, as a result there is a huge need amongst companies for tools and training to be able to launch and scale mobile lifeline services.”

“With the Connected World Forum we bring together experts in the realm of innovative apps and services, regulators, banks, governments and MNOs to share their success stories and the lessons they have learnt in the market place so far,” she added.

Jeurgen Pillinger, business development manager of Orange Austria, which will present its experience at the Connected World Forum, said: “What we have done in the last year and a half is to set up a remote patient monitoring system for the chronic diseases diabetes and hypertension.”

“Following a 12 month trial, we went live in June last year and since then we have been selling the programme on the market quite successfully. We are now looking forward to expand it to various other diseases like COPD, ECG and looking into the lifestyle and wellness sectors as well,” he added.

Pillinger said there are various key challenges facing the mHealth industry in regulated countries such as Austria and the rest of Europe, as the health systems are not yet set up for mHealth services.

“When you talk to doctors they say ‘it is a really good solution, but where are we going to fit it in the regular system of social security?’.  Social securities have already allocated some budget in Austria, but they don’t really know how to use it on the various projects there,” he explained.

“I think there are various opportunities, from remote patient monitoring, to the lifestyle prevention market to just have someone accompanying your daily life, to ambient assisted living.  So I think there are various opportunities for various players and I think we will see quite a lot of people and companies going into the market and doing some really exciting stuff there,” he added. – TradeArabia News Service