The Use of Mobile-health Technology for Monitoring the Health of the Elderly

In the report of the analytical Parsnews, Iran is among ten countries which their population goes to the elderly and its population will reach to breakeven that means equality of the number of births and deaths in 30 years, the subject those experts consider as the old crisis (1). Therefore, financial and human resources expenses to care elderly people whether in nursing homes or in hospitals is a big challenge. Saving lives of many elderly people with early diagnosis is possible by regular and accurate monitoring of their health which mobile health technology is one of the easiest and most available solutions. In this regard, a study in the USA showed that 86% of people over 65 years suffer from at least one chronic disease that three quarters of health care, expense, financial pressure and medical resources allocate to their treatment. The best way to reduce medical expenses and increase empowering community members is preventing chronic diseases and accurate managing of health procedures (2). On the other hand, people’s trend to carry their mobile phone everywhere and their interest to their phones provides increasing opportunity for this technology usage in health field (3). WHO (World Health Or­ganization) defines mobile health as providing healthcare services by using mobile devices like mobile phones, patient navigation devices, PDA (Personal Digital Assistants) and other wireless devices (2). In this regard, the results of Antonicelli et al. study entitled “impact of tele-monitoring at home on the management of elderly patients with congestive heart failure” in 2008 showed that tele-monitoring system reduces readmission rate and regular use of drugs by studied elderly people (4). Grundgeiger et al. in 2011 in their study entitled “Mobile Health Technologies: Applications to Benefit Older Adults” mentioned that mobile health is most likely to reduce demand for labor in the medium term by making applications for elderly people’s care, encouraging them to more self-management and also providing more effective communications among health care providers, heads of households and elderly people (5). It is predicted that until 2014, public and private health care providers can save from 1.96 to 5.83 billion dollar in medical expenses all over the world by using mobile health technologies by health monitoring (6). Available and cheap modern technologies like mobile phone should be used in the best way to reduce healthcare expenses, empower people, and improve monitoring of patients by continuous assessing disease signs and symptoms, control of patients to follow self-management programs and prevent from chronic diseases. Mobile health technology empowers elderly people and prevents from their chronic diseases by enabling continuous monitoring on people’s health. Finally, mobile phone applications can reduce expenses, improve health care quality, and also change health behaviors by promoting prevention and then improving health in the long term