The Food and Drug Administration will soon be monitoring a series of applications that have been developed for smartphones recently that exist for medical use.
USA Today reports that the existence of the iPhone and other smartphones has prompted some developers to create apps meant to monitor its users’ health. Some of these apps are simple enough as they help users calculate their daily calorie intake or how much they need to exercise in order to lose a certain amount of calories. However, some apps are more complex than that and these are the ones that the FDA will regulate.
Some of these applications include outside gadgets that you can plug into the phone such as arm cuffs to measure the user’s blood pressure. These tools include apps that can monitor irregular heartbeats and even measure lung function. The FDA has already approved 75 of these applications and the agency estimates that 500 million smartphone users will use health apps by 2015.