Chances are that while you’re anxiously downloading a cool, new iPhone app, you’re not thinking about all the personal information you are transmitting to third parties. Most people don’t realize that by downloading applications, you’re giving companies access your view your digital footprint – your location, billing address, phone id, when you use your phone, and what types of content you’re pulling down.

No, no … It’s not 1984, it’s 2011. And in 2011, cell phone data is being analyzed to help scientists understand trends in human behavior – and with some pretty impressive results.

“By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick,” according to a group of MIT scientists chronicled by Robert Hotz in an article for the Wall Street Journal, The Really Smart Phone.  “Scientists have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable. These regularities [in behavior] allow systems to learn much more about us as individuals than we would care for.”

Since research on these fronts is still being collected and collated, it’s too early for us to understand exactly where these advances will lead us. Marketers, however, should expect to have a richer understanding of consumers and consumer behavior based on these findings in the future.

@MJBlackford

Imagine this scenario. A passenger on a bus requires CPR resuscitation. There are no qualified paramedics. Another passenger uses a mobile app that instructs the user how to perform CPR. The first passenger dies. Is the person who performed CPR liable? How about the app-maker?

On a particularly busy day, a care provider uses a symptom checker on their mobile device to diagnose a patient. The diagnosis proves incorrect, and the patient’s condition significantly worsens. Is the maker of the app liable?

Over 10,000 health-related mobile apps targeting consumers are available in the Apple iTunes store – a figure that’s expected to continue its exponential growth. Unfortunately, as Jane M. Von Bergen reports in a new article for the Philly Inquirer, Caution Urged As Smartphone Technology Expands Into Medicine and Health, regulatory oversight has not kept pace with the growth of mobile health apps, creating the potential for thorny, litigious situations such as those described above.

@NeilAndrewJames

Say hello to the newest players in the mobile healthcare app arena – the Harvard Business School prodigies. As chronicled in the Mobile Marketing Watch Article, Harvard Students Aim to Rock Mobile Health Initiative, the Health 2.0 Incubator, Rock Health, is “a group of dedicated individuals working to catalyze innovation in the interactive health space.” Teaming up with Harvard advisors and partners, it should be exciting to see what these young minds come up with.

@MJBlackford