Health Apps

hether you want to lose weight or improve your lifestyle by eating healthier, you may need a motivational tool to stick to your promises.

EatDifferent is a new app that helps you set goals and track your progress on a daily basis. The app allows you to stay aware of your eating habits, such as "avoid processed food" or "added sugar" or "eat more grains", reminding you about your promises every day.

What if you can't make yourself workout on a daily basis? There are many ways to motivate us being more active, but the new iPhone app has probably one of the most powerful ones.

The system rewards you with money when your exercise and charges you when you don't.

Vitadock, the new iPhone app that works in sync with docking devices, is meant to monitor and check your health.

The Vitadock app is developed by German company Medisana and is available on Apple's App Store. The app works with docking monitors that visualize vital health signs and can be purchased. For example, GlucoDock is designed for diabetics to check blood sugar, Thermodock is a monitor that takes body temperature immediately using infrared technology, CardioDock is meant to check blood pressure, while TargetScale is developed for weight management. The docking devices are connected to your iPhone, iPad or iPod.

Nothing can be more annoying than a sound of alarm clock early in the morning, when you can hardly open your eyes. LARK is a sleep system that works with your iPad or iPhone to help you sleep and wake up better.

The system uses silent alarm technology waking you up gently and naturally using soothing vibrations.

If you have to deal with high blood pressure, checking your blood pressure and heart rate regularly becomes crucial to your health condition. The iHealth Blood Pressure Monitoring System that was developed for your iPhone, iPod or iPad includes a blood pressure cuff, portable dock and an iHealth application for this purpose.

Using the iHealth on your iPhone, you can check your blood pressure and heart rate, placing your gadget in the portable dock that also charges it for longer use.

Every parent knows how difficult is to make your child eat those veggies and beat the junk food addiction. In many cases, actions are much better than words, especially when you use a hi-tech way to persuade your child into eating healthier.

Count your peas is an iPad application developed by Design Seedling that is aimed at making healthy eating fun for children. This app uses interactive games and lots of useful information that help kids organize their eating better. The Count your peas app features a calculator to count servings, based on the Food Pyramid groups. Parents together with their children can view how much calories their food contains and how much they actually need to eat. They can find out the key recommendations on each food group to become nutritionally smarter.

There is also a variety of fun games and tools that makes the learning more entertaining, including the tic tac toe game with whole grain cereals or completing a dried bean mosaics.

In a bid to make all couch potatoes move, the new iPhone app makes working out a game with the prize for those who try hard.

Nexercise is an app that tracks you physical activities, such as running, walking, aerobics, dancing, weightlifting and many others and rewards you for being active with free and discounted merchandise.

Millions of people suffer from vision problems, including the condition called presbyopia, which is most common among older people. The Ucansi company has developed an iPhone app called GlassesOff that delays the need for reading glasses, training your brain to process blurred images.

Presbyopia is the condition that makes it hard to focus on things close by as we age. It is often accompanied by tired eyes and headaches and requires reading glasses.

If you plan to lose weight, the smartphone application can become your best friend. The recent study conducted by Emily Breton at the George Washington University and her team revealed which weight loss apps are based on scientific knowledge and work the best and which are useless and even harmful.

In the study, the researchers analyzed 204 apps for weight loss available in iTunes store in 2009. Of course, since then a lot more applications has emerged, but the study can provide useful information on what to look for when choosing a weight loss app.

Nowadays a variety of iPhone apps allow people to monitor their health, including blood pressure, healthy eating habits, weight and other important aspects of your health.

Now, a new iPhone app was developed to monitor your psychological and physical stress level. Basically the Stress Check app by Azumio analyzes your heart rate that is known to correlate to different levels of stress.

Your Smartphone can soon become your best doctor, as the new Android app can predict the beginning of the illness, such as flu or common cold and depression, before you even realize it yourself.

DailyData is an application created by MIT Media Lab that is able to alert the user, if something goes wrong with their health by analyzing SMS data, calling data and locating data.