Health care is transforming quickly due to mobile and web technologies. The driving forces behind this development are not the traditional players, rather they are start-ups and software experts. To keep track of innovation, Health 2.0 held its annual European session in Berlin last week.

Neil Bacon, founder of the rate and review platform iwantgreatcare.org, set the tone for the panels that followed: “Power, influence and money are still with the providers. It is crucial to unleash the power of the users.” More than 75 technology demos illustrated promising web and mobile solutions that live up to his claim:

• The highly acclaimed mobile phone app mySugr helps diabetics to manage their condition. It employs a gamified approach to monitor the disease and has many rewards in store to keep patients engaged.

• Nhumi.com‘s mission is to improve communication between doctors and patients by providing a 3D-model of the entire human body in which diseases can be localized and described.

• To overcome language barriers, universaldoctor.com helps translating between many different languages. Its crowd sourcing approach makes it easy for doctors to submit their own bilingual suggestions to facilitate medical consultation.

• Biovotion presented a sensor that monitors physiological functions non-invasively and thereby helps reducing hospital stays.

Social networks also apply more and more to professional interaction. In networks like BestDoctors.com, physicians can build communities where they can ask for second opinions from the best specialists from around the world. The Spanish Fundación Recover fosters cooperation between physicians in industrialized and third-world countries via the Internet. Khresmoi.com is a powerful search and access system for biomedical information that includes a multitude of text and image sources in combination with a semantic search engine.

See on www.health2news.com