In 2013, when Julie Hudak read about an iPhone app that could diagnose skin cancer, she downloaded it right away. Her husband and sister-in-law had both died of melanoma, and she didn’t want to miss any early signs of the disease in her three children. It was easy to use—simply upload a photo of a mole and get a color-coded result: Green meant cancer was unlikely, yellow was a maybe, and red indicated danger. Even though the dermatologist had assured Hudak just a week earlier that her children’s skin looked fine, she decided to snap photos of her 11-year-old daughter’s moles. Seconds later, the results appeared. “Some came up yellow, and one was red,” Hudak recalls. “I panicked.” She called the dermatologist for an emergency appointment.
Online retailers like iTunes and Amazon offer thousands of apps promising all kinds of real-time information about your body—they can measure blood pressure, take your pulse, track your menstrual cycle, and tell you how well your lungs are working. Mobile health is one of the fastest-growing app categories: According to the consulting firm research2guidance, there are 100,000 mobile health apps on the market, double the number available two and a half years ago. The industry is worth some $4 billion today, and analysts predict that it will reach $26.5 billion by 2017.
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