By Clinical Informatics News Staff 

July 27, 2015 | A new app called Alert is taking an unusually direct approach to mobile health: its aim is to make it as easy as possible for users to call their family members and caregivers in case of a medical emergency. With the push of a button on their smart phone’s lock screen, or by shaking the phone when the app is open, users of Alert can start a conference call with three preselected contacts, send information on their current location, and quickly escalate to a 911 call if things deteriorate.

Most mHealth tools on the market today have concentrated on the longitudinal use of continuous health data ― tracking useful metrics like activity, blood pressure, and glucose levels over time to produce an overall picture of users’ health. But the creators of Alert, at a small company called HelpAround, are more interested in making tools with real-world functions in the moment. “The last 90 days of graphs are really less interesting than the last 90 seconds,” says CEO Yishai Knobel.

At HelpAround, Knobel has focused on social aspects of care for people with chronic diseases. His company’s previous app is Diabetes Helpers, which puts diabetes patients in contact with other patients in their area to share supplies when they run low or their testing equipment breaks down. The app has found most of its users around metropolitan hubs, especially among people with type 1 diabetes, for whom disease management is a stringent and lifelong process.

“Our vision was, we’re going to find the right resource for the chronic patient at the right time,” Knobel says. “The level of solidarity, and the willingness of people to step up for each other, in chronic conditions is very, very high. So the ability to start aggregating that kind of knowledge on a local level is priceless.”

The philosophy of both Diabetes Helpers and Alert is that patients prefer to deal with their medical needs outside of the healthcare environment whenever possible. Minor emergencies can usually be handled by a personal network of caregivers, rather than through a lengthy and expensive hospital visit. Diabetes patients, for instance, who may become woozy and disoriented when their blood sugar is too high or too low, much prefer to reach out to their families rather than going straight to 911. That becomes easier if they don’t have to fumble through multiple layers of UIs on their phones.

“We have people right now who have epilepsy, people with dementia and Alzheimer’s, or caregivers who might get stuck with an elderly parent and need help,” says Knobel. “We have people who suffer from panic attacks, and maybe you’re out of breath and can’t describe where you are… We wanted to make the pre-911 circle as easy and accessible as possible.”

The idea behind Alert is simple, but its designers are touting one feature they consider cutting edge. For diabetics who use the app on their iPhones, Alert is able to communicate with Apple’s HealthKit, an mHealth platform that aggregates medical data from many devices. While most apps that connect to HealthKit use the platform to chart and analyze data, Alert uses it as a real-time feed on a patient’s condition. If HealthKit picks up a blood glucose reading outside a specified range, Alert can automatically open and begin a call within 5 seconds unless the user overrides it. “This is the first time that any iPhone app is taking advantage of HealthKit in real time,” Knobel says.

Several brands of glucose monitors have been programmed to share readings with HealthKit. In fact, Knobel began his mHealth career writing apps to work with one of these monitors, the iBGStar produced by AgaMatrix.

At the moment, the real-time character of Alert is more an ancillary feature than a core part of the app’s value. Blood glucose meters like iBGStar must be operated manually, so Alert is unlikely to be anyone’s first warning that their blood sugar is out of range. But manufacturers of continuous glucose monitors, which read glucose levels without intervention, may one day choose to plug their devices into HealthKit, in which case Alert will be able to keep tabs on users who haven’t been thinking about their glucose levels and reach out for help if they veer off balance.

To Knobel, access to up-to-minute data on patients’ conditions is one of the most exciting developments in mHealth. Central platforms like HealthKit are also making it easier for companies like his to reach large numbers of users, to take full advantage of that new wealth of information. “We don’t have to connect to this meter and that meter,” he says. “The beauty of HealthKit is that it just grabs the data and shares it with all your other apps. We want to set the tone for many other apps to follow, and start taking advantage of that data in real time.”