I visited the Smartphone in London and it was very interesting event indeed.

Along with the device manufacturers, there was good cross-section of companies working with the main stream applications. For my surprise there was even one healthcare related application (ECG monitoring) present in the Symbian stand. Or at least there should have been. When I asked about the healthcare application from the ladies at the Symbian stand, they were very confused. They pointed me to the each corner of the Symbian stand one after the other but still I didn’t manage to see the presentation (I just wonder if the application was present at all?).

Anyway it was very interesting to see people’s reactions when they asked what kind of business I am with. When I told that I am developing healthcare and personal wellbeing related applications almost everyone looked like they are going to ask: “Come again?” I was expecting this. Healthcare and personal wellbeing solutions with mobile devices are not part of the main stream development today and therefore these solutions are not very well known. But when I finished explaining and demonstrating, everyone thought that the use of mobile devices with health related applications is justified indeed. Especially the muscle control (bicep control) demonstration seemed to interest everyone I demonstrated it.

One particularly memorable event in London was as follows. I had the bicep control demonstration with me (this time with the Bounce game and with the 3D Snakes game for Series60 3^rd edition). At the Forum Nokia Pro evening reception I literarily hooked up one Nokia guy for the muscle control demonstration. I placed EMG electrodes to his both biceps and explained him how the MuscleControl application works. You should have seen the reaction when he played the Bounce game with his biceps. The genuine enthusiasm he presented as he played was the best feedback I needed to be convinced that this kind of “health entertainment” would be really accepted in general public as well.

As it seems that the healthcare solutions are strange for smart phone community, you might think that in the healthcare community smartphone solutions are widely known; not exactly. In November I will be participating world’s largest medical event Medica 2006 in Düsseldorf, Germany (15^th – 18^th November). Medica is really big event. The event takes 4 days and there are over 3600 exhibitors and over 136000 visitors (year 2005 statistics). Last year I got almost the same response in Medica for the healthcare applications with smartphones than in the Smartphone show. So based on my experience, healthcare applications utilizing smartphones are somewhere between the smartphone community and the healthcare community. This is one issue that makes this area so interesting. Every time I discuss with people about these solutions, I get different point of view to think of.

As said this much, I must say that I have really enjoyed talking with people about the “health visions” and all.