Market For Mobile Health Apps Projected To Quadruple To $400 Million By 2016

The latest healthtech research shows that the forecast is looking good for mobile health solutions, especially for those companies buying into mobile apps. ABI Research recently released a report which predicts that the sports and health mobile app market is on pace to hit $400 million in revenues by 2016. That’s up from $120 million in 2010, meaning the market could quadruple over the next four years. ABI’s report projects that the majority of that $400 million will come from sports, fitness, and wellness apps, which have begun to see heavy adoption over the least year. The increase of available health data and the growing adoption of health-related apps is owed largely to the development of increasingly wearable, portable, and non-invasive devices and their sensors that can effectively measure and transmit biometric data.

As smartphones add new ways to access and support healthcare apps and connect with these complementary diagnostic and health-measure devices, the mobile health market — and its customers — only stand to benefit. There are many great examples of this new generation of smart health tracking devices, like Basis’ heart and health tracker that you can wear on your wrist, Lark’s sleep monitoring band — to name a few. These wearable devices are hooked into apps and web dashboards that let users track and improve their health. These bundled solutions are becoming increasingly user-friendly and intelligent, with many beginning to take advantage of gamification to keep users interested and coming back.

Naturally, everyone wants to build a graph, interest, social, etc., and the health graph seems to be poised to be next in line. RunKeeper, an app that helps users track their exercise, is just one among many going after the health graph — that is to say, they’re looking to aggregate all of your fitness and health data, culled from an ecosystem of apps and smart-sensored devices that collect and transmit this data (and speak to each other through APIs), then serving it to users across platforms and mobile devices, all through a simple dashboard. And RunKeeper isn’t alone. This is where the healthtech industry is going — well, there and of course digitizing health records as well as making everything about health insurance less of a pain in the ass.

In conjunction with ABI’s report on the mobile health market’s growth, Juniper Research today released its own study, forecasting that “mHealth” apps will reach 142 million downloads globally by 2016. Which is slightly puzzling, especially when contrasted with the projection made by Jonathan Collins, the principal analyst at ABI Research. Collins said that he expects downloads to grow at almost twice the rate of revenues, with more than a billion downloads occurring annually by 2016. Collins appears to be more optimistic than Juniper, which is likely using slightly different criteria to define mobile health apps.

But the point is clear, mobile health is on the rise.

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