This week’s Smart Health roundup features health apps that assess wounds, reward fitness activity, and help travelers keep healthy while vacationing.

E-Kare’s wound assessment app

Researchers at the Children’s National Health System have developed an app to minimize the pain in wound assessment. The app is now being developed by spin-off company E-Kare Inc. and will be able to extract measurements of a wound over time by taking a 3D photo of the wound using a sensor that attaches to an iPad.

Health care workers will be able to assess wounds without having to touch the wound, and all the information gathered will be stored in the cloud to be easily accessed by the health team. Though the app is being developed to help assess wounds in children, it can also be used in adults to reduce the costly treatment cost of advanced wound care being applied to at least 6.5 million patients annually.

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Reward Me fitness app literally rewards its users

Getting fit can be quite a task, requiring a great deal of motivation and dedication. This is why UnitedHealthCare Services, Inc. is developing an app that rewards users for using the app.

Called Reward Me, the app is being pilot tested in Arizona and Illinois and offers users rewards when they use the app and accomplish achievements in four categories: namely healthy eating, relaxation, healthy activity and lifestyle.

The rewards will depend on the market and retailers who will partner up with UnitedHealth. Some rewards can include discounts on sports apparel, yoga or fitness classes, juice bars or even restaurants that offer healthy food choices.

Kirk Pion, vice president and Innovation Champion for UnitedHealth, explains that the more a users uses the app, the incentives will keep piling up. This may help people actually stick to their fitness goals.

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My Travel Health app keeps you from being sick while travelling

Travel and Health Wellness LLC has developed an app called My Travel Health which aims to keep travellers safe while on a trip by providing the necessary information they need regarding the place they are visiting.

Travelling can expose people to local illnesses brought about by unsanitary conditions as well as communicable diseases and can really ruin a vacation.

“International travelers are frequently unaware or unprepared for common illnesses encountered during foreign travels, especially to developing countries,” said Dr. Rizwan Sohail, a consultant in travel and tropical medicine at Mayo Clinic, and chief medical officer of Travel Health and Wellness. “Travelers often end up spending valuable business or vacation time in hotel rooms due to illness, are forced to seek medical help in foreign countries, or return home with serious illnesses such as measles, typhoid, malaria, dengue or tuberculosis. My Travel Health provides specific and easy-to-follow recommendations to prevent or deal with travel-related illnesses.”

Users just need to plot their destination on the My Trip section of the app get more information about their destination such as where the local embassy is located for local health information and assistance and is pre-populated with packing and to-do list before travel that is also modifiable. In the Health section, travel health content licensed from the Mayo Clinic are provided such as common travel-related illnesses such as diarrhea, malaria, respiratory infections, blood clots, heat exhaustion, motion sickness and jet lag. And for the Fitness section, exercises that can be performed while traveling and recommendations on safe travel for pregnant women and those with serious medical illnesses are provided.

Image via Flickr under Creative Commons license