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Despite the prevalence of smartphones, the people who use them to look up medical information or to run applications for managing their health tend to be younger city dwellers. The Mobile Health 2010 report, a recent project of the Pew Research Center, found that only 17 percent of cell phone owners use the devices to look up health or medical information, yet 29 percent of cell owners between the ages 18-29 have actually done such searches.
The report also found:
* Nine percent of cell owners have software applications or "apps" on their phones that help them track or manage their health. Some 15 percent of those ages 18-29 have them.
* Fifteen percent of African American cell phone owners use mobile health apps, compared with 11 percent of Latino and 7 percent of white cell phone users.
* Urban cell phone owners are more likely than those who live in suburban or rural areas to have a mobile health app on their phone.
The survey, conducted as part of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found no significant differences in patterns of use between men and women or among income groups.
A report of the survey's findings notes that almost 300,000 applications run on iPhones, Blackberries and Androids. Among those related to health are apps for counting calories, gleaning nutrition information, logging fitness workouts, monitoring vital signs, providing health tips, calculating disease risks, and body mass index, keeping personal health records, providing information to health care workers, learning about medicines, quitting smoking and performing yoga stretching exercises at work.
Additional research by Pew suggests that wireless devices lead users to gather, share and create new information on the Internet.
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