Applications in mobile health ("mHealth") are global in scope. While growth has been rapid in the industrial world, mHealth initiatives in emerging countries have advanced even more quickly due to the penetration of mobile phone technologies. Mobile Health Markets are global in potential with an estimated 7.8 billion mobile subscriptions with 4.4 billion classified as smartphones worldwide. Rapid growth is occurring in low, middle and high-income markets (https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/reports/november-2017/key-figures).

The global mHealth market was pegged at $13.2 billion in 2016, with a forecast of $46.2 billion by 2021 and a projected CAGR of 28.6% to 2021. The portion of that market in the US and Canada is expected to be $16.7 billion. As healthcare shifts towards a patient- centric value-based healthcare system, increasingly healthcare providers will adopt mHealth solutions that enable them to increase productivity and improve efficiencies. In addition, patients are taking a more active role in their health and wellbeing on-the-go utilizing mobile apps, connected devices and wearables to monitor health conditions and provide actionable outputs (Note: HLC162B_Report Overview: Mobile Health mHealth Technologies and Global Markets).

Mobile healthcare is getting personal, offering smartphone apps and medical devices for predictive, participatory and preventive self-care in rapidly growing consumer sectors. Self-management of healthcare is on the rise as well. In 2017, 97% of US adults own a mobile device with 77% of those owning smartphones, which is substantial growth up from 35% who owned smartphones in 2011 (http://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2017/01/12/evolution-of-technology). In the US in 2015, 62% of smartphone users overall had accessed health information and 58% of smartphone users had downloaded a health or fitness app (http://mhealth.jmir.org/2015/4/e101).

Within the emerging BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), most notably India and China, a collision of needs and opportunities is taking place. With nearly 3 billion of the world's population and a rapidly growing middle class, the demand for improved healthcare is on the rise. The emerging markets healthcare sector is large. Within the four BRIC countries, the healthcare market is capitalized at more than $850 billion. Across the broader emerging markets, healthcare is estimated to be a $1.3 trillion industry. The emerging markets healthcare sector is quickly approaching the size of Europe's healthcare market. In fact, in certain sub-sectors, the emerging markets ranked among the fastest-growing countries in the world (http://www.sigulerguff.com/sites/default/files/2014.11.12-Siguler-Guff-Healthcare-in-the-EmergingMarkets.pdf).

On the strength of their manufacturing and distribution bases, strategic BRIC partners are expected to help drive entry into their respective emerging markets while supporting rapid growth into high-income markets.

In the poorest and emerging regions of the world, healthcare is very different. The patients are younger and sicker. There is little or no availability of medical equipment to support diagnosis and treatment. Pre-eclampsia is a leading cause of maternal deaths, responsible for 76,000 women deaths annually and 500,000 infant deaths. Pneumonia is the single largest infectious cause of death in children worldwide and resulted in 902,136 deaths of children under 5 years of age in 2015, and premature births contribute to an additional 1 million newborn deaths; concentrated within the poorest populations around the world. Additionally, sepsis claims the lives of one million newborns and 100,000 pregnant and recently pregnant women annually. These disorders can be managed with simple treatments if a diagnosis is established.

Each of these segments intersects the others with the same common requirement that reliable vital signs monitoring data be made readily accessible through data networks, collected and analyzed in scalable cloud infrastructure. In fact, affordability, availability, and acceptability are known to be the keys to adoption.