A recent report looks at the future growth of the mHealth market:
The Research and Markets mHealth trends report shows the industry poised for a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent by 2017, to reach a value of $26 billion. This revenue, researchers project, will be derived predominantly from mHealth hardware sales and services.
Study findings also estimate that some 50 percent of mobile users will have downloaded mHealth applications within five years.
The last two sentences are the ones that really matter. First, it sees most of the growth from hardware sales and services. This is really interesting since so much of the activity in mHealth is in the software arena. See the thousands and thousands of mHealth apps in the various app stores. This report seems to say that these mHealth software will be a small portion of the actual market. Does this make sense?
The other thing that makes me question the study is the comment that within 5 years 50% of mobile users will have downloaded an mHealth application. I guess it depends on how you define an mHealth application, but I think that number will be much larger. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re at 50% of users having an mHealth application on their phone today. If we want to talk about mHealth application use, that’s a different story, but I think a huge percentage of mobile users have downloaded mHealth applications.
What do you think of these trends? Are you seeing these trends or are you seeing something different?
