Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

PEPID has released a medical application for the Palm Pre. The new PEPID app is designed specifically for the device’s  Web OS and provides healthcare providers access to life-saving protocols, drug interactions and other patient care information directly from the device.

The company is also developing the app for other devices and operating systems, and the next big release will be for the Google Android platform.

“PEPID contains the most extensive drug database on the market today, thousands of disease profiles and medical conditions, medical and dosing calculators, a drug interactions checker, along with numerous illustrations, laboratory values, and a differential diagnosis generator, all available on the Palm Pre.”

Smartphones have been playing a powerful role in the healthcare industry as of late. With anywhere access and unlimited information, users now have accessible, and even life-saving tools. A man survived the earthquake in Haiti with the help of an iPhone first-aid app that taught him how to treat his wounds. The NPR iPhone app also helped a doctor save a woman’s life after a stroke. While some see mobile as a channel for entertainment, it is proving itself to be useful in emergency situations as well.

Feeling under the weather? Cough into your phone for a diagnosis. Scientists are developing a way to do this by building an audio database to match recorded coughs against. Wet or dry, productive or non-productive, categorizing coughs is nothing new. Doctors have been doing it for ages to make decisions regarding their patients' health. Now it can be done digitally. Telegraph details the process here.

Free Gifts to Students Who Agree to Receive Ads on Their Mobiles [The Guardian]
Orange is launching a plan that will give concert tickets, accessories, and even bill discounts for 16-24 year olds who receive ads on their phones ( in form of texts and market surveys). The carrier hopes to attract more of Gen-Y, by going to their interests...and their wallets.

Camera Phones Can Help Diagnosis [E-Health Insider]
Camera phones can help doctors understand certain conditions a little better. By taking a picture of a visually apparent condition, users can offer doctors ways of knowing how the condition evolved and what it might be.

Pedal Power for Kenya's Mobiles [BBC News]
Two Kenyan students have developed a way of charging cell phones with bicycles. Looking to market the idea, the use for it in many countries around the world in undeniable, further integrating mobile into daily user life.

A Statistical Look at Urban Indian Mobile Users [Priyanka’s Blog]
Key mobile data from one of the largest mobile using nation. Noteworthy: Orkut is the favorite social network accessed through mobile, 45.6% use Google mobile, 86% have participated in SMS contests, and Internet and SMS are the two main factors in choosing a carrier in India.

Mobile Coupon Users Want More Junk [Marketing Charts]
New data from the U.K. takes a look at what mobile coupon users prefer to see when it comes to mobile ads. 30% said they don't enjoy drink promotions, 76% thought the redemption process was easy, and the whole survey was done via SMS.

French Government Building a Mobile Portal [Mobile Industry Review]
To offer all citizens access to public and general services, the French government is launching Proximamobile. The idea is to offer a mobile portal of applications and services for the public at large, developed by the community.

Well, That's the End of Flip: iPods to Get Cameras [Fast Company]
After the announcement that the iPod Touch will get a mic so it can call, it seems that other basic functionality of cell phones are coming to the whole gamut of iPods.

Twitter Takes a Step Toward Commercial Accounts [NYTimes]
Twitter released its Twitter 101 web pages and slideshow to show how businesses can profit from the service. It's a first step in eventually creating business accounts that will offer more features than normal ones and help Twitter monetize.

• Industry Pitching Cellphones as a Teaching Tool [New York Times] - CTIA is making the case for cellphones in the classroom and, you know, it makes sense. By pitching them as a viable educational tool due to their inexpensiveness (relative to laptops) and convenience, they're also tagging a trend that's been sweeping developing countries like India and Brazil, where mobile users have essentially skipped computers and gone straight to handsets.
• Surgeons send 'tweets' from operating room [CNN] - We mentioned surgery tweeting awhile back and it happened again the other day. Let's just hope no one @'s your surgeon that hilarious kitten video during your appendectomy.
• Shazam Seeing 1M Song Tags a Day [Media Bistro] - Shazam seems to be a hit for Apple's App store, generating about one million song tags a day. It is not to be confused with its semantic cousin, Kazaam, which did not generate millions of anything.
• Microsoft targets its own smartphone store [Financial Times] - Microsoft is hoping to borrow some application thunder from Apple and Android by putting out the news that a Windows Mobile storefront is brewing.
• Mobile Web Becoming a Necessity [Media Bistro] - Mobile data plans are a necessity. If you're on this site, you probably already know that. However, in a recent survey by Nielsen, for Tellabs, they found that 71 percent of those surveyed agreed. Internet is the most popular reason (duh), followed by e-mail and messaging. :D
• Implementation of Universal Phone Chargers [Mobile Burn] - Universal phone chargers! It may seem minor, but if you've ever been to a friend's house and found your phone gasping for air and about to go under - only to discover that your friend doesn't have a charger to fit your set - then you know why this is hot.
• Twitter Triumphant [Mobility Site] - In this great piece by Zealot, Twitter is positioned as the horse on which to pin our colors in the race towards actually connecting the world via web. It's not that it's doing anything essentially new, it's simply doing it in a unique, easy and engaging way. It requires only a matter of seconds to drop into someone else's world and, in turn, bring them into ours.
• The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives [New York Times] - As John Markoff points out in this piece, social map applications are quickly turning us into Sims-esque characters on a grid, with flashing green lights above our heads.

• This Modern Age: The Youth Ball Welcomes Obama with a Sea of Digital Cameras [Gizmodo] - The image really speaks for itself here. Note that it is the Youth Ball. It paints a compelling picture for those companies and brands not sure whether or not to dip a foot in the mobile pool yet. If anything, they should be rushing to populate the space so that, by the time these young consumers reach full consumption potential, they are already used to interacting with those brands that capitalized early.
• I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle [Wired] - Another location-based feature from Wired - this time it's freelancer Matthew Honan's discovery of just how transparent the world can be through location-based applications. True, some care and some don't - it's more of a case study on the potential level of interaction and the decrease in privacy for those who choose to play.
• Sephora launches mobile service to assist shoppers in-store [Mobile Marketer] - Sephora recently rolled out a mobile service that allows in-store shoppers to check customer reviews re: products of interest on their mobile phones. It's a perfect synthesis of relative and timely content and should ultimately serve Sephora by building customer loyalty.
• Time sensitive mobile contents - Day to Evening deco mail [CScout Japan] - This mobile mall from Gigno System changes its theme depending on the time of day. It's cute in the morning and afternoon, but at night, the lipstick and eyeliner come out. It's perfect for those who unwind from the more formal light of day by breaking out the leather and hitting the neon.
• The first live-tweeted surgery [Global Neighbourhoods] - The surgery wasn't directed via Twitter (thank god, given its history of crashing unexpectedly), rather, the surgery updates were tweeted live to a conference of professionals interested in the procedure in question.
• Arsenal fans could catch replays, live action on Sony's PSP [Engadget] - Sony is working to develop software that would allow live replays and, perhaps, real-time interaction between fans on their PSPs during Arsenal home games. (British soccer, for those who don't know) However, given the rowdy nature of soccer games, PSPs brought into the stadium may only provide a high-tech beatdown for those in the way of portable-wielding fans.
• Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location [Wired] - Are you addicted to GPS? Does location-based content make you sweat? Do you spend your nights tossing and turning, wondering which celebrity has the largest chin? If you answered yes to the first two, Wired has got your hook-up for location-based goodness. For the insomniacs, see here.

Just as John Stuart Mill argued that there were both simple and higher levels in the realm of pleasure, we continue to see many uses for cell phone technology beyond "Mice Love Rice" ringbacks.

This is especially true when it comes to healthcare. A few days ago, we presented the possibility of patient monitoring by way of cell phone. Now Berkeley researchers are looking at using cell phones as data transmitters in medical imaging. For those interested parties who can’t quite make it through the entire article in PlosONE, self included, Roland Piquepaille offers a more digestible summary on his Web site.

While medical imaging is usually easy to access for those in more developed countries, millions are not privy to the devices or expertise needed to obtain much-needed information. By allowing data to be translated and analyzed at a remote location, thanks to cell phone transmission, these researchers are poised to take a huge step in bringing modern medicine to the entire world. So, while many heralded the arrival of the Internet as the end of borders across the world, it seems as if mobile will become the road by which we travel.