The pharmaceutical industry giant is now calling for a focus on the mobile health sector.
The mhealth sector of the industry has been growing at a tremendous rate on many different levels and now Pfizer has announced that it is throwing its hat in the ring because it will help to provide for the aging populations in developing countries.
The company has declared that this will be the most powerful tool for assisting these people around the world.
The announcement from Pfizer is that it believes that mhealth can become a very powerful tool for populations that are aging in developing countries. It feels that governments, health workers, researchers, and the private sector should all make this technology a priority. This is taking into consideration that by the year 2050, the population of the world that is over the age of 60 will have broken the 2 billion mark. The largest growth will come from countries with low- and middle- incomes.
These are also the areas with the largest mobile phone growth, meaning that mhealth can have a wide reach.
This is important because many of the countries in which the growth of mobile phones has been the largest are also those in which there is the least amount of preparedness for the change in health requirements as the elderly populations continue to grow. The chief medical officer at Pfizer, Freda Lewis-Hall, has stated that the coming together of a broadening elderly population and the rising use of mobile tech is not an opportunity to overlook.
Lewis-Hall said that “The universal use of mobile devices is one of the greatest social changes of our lifetimes. Within the next year, the number of mobile phones in use will reach 7.3 billion – more than the number of people on our planet – with the fastest growth coming in low-to-middle-income regions.”
Equally, the world is being faced with a number of large challenges to be able to meet the needs of the elderly population as it continues to grow in size. As these two trends align, “we have tremendous opportunities to tap mobile technology to help us all get old better.”
There were a number of different methods and techniques that were highlighted by the company as suggestions regarding the ways in which mhealth tech can be applied to help to overcome these challenges. They included everything from training health workers, keeping a social connection among older people, enabling remote monitoring, and providing caregivers with support.
