Once again underscoring the growing popularity and prevalence of mobile tracking devices and sensors, Polar USA – a fast-growing industry leader in heart rate monitoring and fitness assessment technologies – is touting its newest release.

Polar Stride Sensor Bluetooth Smart is billed as the first ever Bluetooth Smart sensor that will allow runners to track speed and distance and capture intelligent training data while using a compatible device.

“Bluetooth Smart is connecting technologies and people in ways that were never before possible,” explains Herb Baer, Polar USA president. “We worked to pioneer the heart rate profile for Bluetooth Smart, and we’re excited that we’re staying at the forefront of product development as we launch the Stride Sensor.”

The Stride Sensor Bluetooth Smart is a small, lightweight device that clips onto the user’s shoe, capturing a wide range of useful data including stride length, cadence, running speed and distance.

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Vanderbilt University has launched a $20,000 Health App Challenge, the goal of which is to help transform patient clinical summaries into easy to understand personalized health information.

Entries may be submitted May 1- Aug. 1, with a $10,000 winner and five $2,000 winners to be announced Aug. 14.

“This is a first for Vanderbilt, but what we love about this approach is that it truly allows non-medical people who are passionate about health care to change the way we communicate to patients,” explains Dr. Kevin Johnson, Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) and professor of Pediatrics.

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Doctors and nurses often care for their patients so deeply that it frustrates them to no end when a patient suffers as a result of their inability to follow physician’s orders.

But in some cases, that frustration can result in a positive outcome.

Frustrated to no end with a teenage transplant patient who didn’t take his medication on time (a situation that resulted in hist body’s rejection of the kidney), University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics physician Patrick Brophy wanted to find a solution for this problem.

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Contests to help spur innovation in the mHealth application market is nothing new — we’ve seen countless apps emerge from such events around the world as the mobile healthcare industry continues to gain incredible momentum.

The latest event to produce such innovation took place just before the Health 2.0 Europe Conference in Berlin, in which Aetna sponsored a code-a-thon with EUR 10K worth of prizes.  Aetna invited the best developers, designers, health experts and health tech entrepreneurs to compete on the challenge of developing “innovative mobile apps to promote health and wellness across the globe.”

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Walgreens is continuing its aggressive mHealth push by launching yet another pilot program to allow customers to schedule appointment to its clinics directly from their smartphones.

The pilot program was launched at clinics in Denver and Chicago as a start, and to use the new scheduling service patients must first download the free iTriage app for iPhones and Android devices.  The partnership with iTriage is key, as it signifies how important this app has become in the mHealth space.  In its first three years since launch, for example, iTriage has seen more than 6 million downloads.

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It was announced today that Kony Solutions, makers of a multi-channel application development platform called KonyOne, has launched an updated version of its mHealth application targeted at healthcare payers.

The updated mobile app is targeted at payers looking to offer members end-to-end mobile solutions, in addition to putting secure health plan information at the patient’s fingertips, on any mobile device they want to use.  Kony’s multi-channel platform supports 99% of mobile devices in use today, including Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows, J2ME devices, HTML5, native or hybrid applications as well as older mobile web browsers.

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Back in December at the mHealth Summit, the Surgeon General’s office launched a challenge that called on mobile app developers to create apps in three different categories; healthy eating & nutrition; physical fitness/activity; and integrative health and well-being.

In the healthy eating category, joint winners were selected as “equally outstanding submissions,” including GoodGuide — an app that makes it easy to get the information you need about your food, personal care and household products to aid in making healthy decisions — as well as Fooducate, which uses barcode scanning to allow you to scan the products you buy to quickly get information on that food’s health value.

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