/ 25 June 2014

Mobilise your medical history with apps

Out in the cold: Welshman Ncube.
Out in the cold: Welshman Ncube.

MyMedRec
With MyMedRec, users can share health records with family members, doctors, nurses, pharmacists or anyone else involved in their healthcare. Users can set reminders for taking medication and doctors’ appointments. And the app stores medication records and immunisation schedules, should a doctor ever need to access them.

Platform: BlackBerry OS 10 and above
Stockists: Visit the BlackBerry App World
Expect to pay: A free download

Up Coffee
The Up Coffee app is a part of a suite of apps designed to work with the JawBone fitness bracelet. The app displays users’ caffeine intake and is then able to work out how much coffee they can drink without disrupting their sleep. After a week, the app rates users and provides helpful hints should they need to cut down on their coffee intake. Although the app is more of a gimmick than a practical tool, it is interesting to see how quickly a cup of coffee every now and then adds up over a month – and what impact it has on sleep.  

Platform: iOS
Stockists: www.jawbone.com
Expect to pay: A free download

Documents To Go, version four
Smartphones and tablets are now at the point where they are able to handle some of the most resource-intensive applications. That said, their diminutive screens sometimes make working on these devices difficult. The latest version of Documents To Go was built with small screens in mind, so makes editing, viewing and creating Microsoft Office documents that much easier. Users are able to zoom in on a particular section of a document for easy editing and reading. A full-screen mode with pop-up toolbars gives just that much extra screen space. The latest version lets users save their documents directly to the phone or tablet or to the cloud for collaboration with other employees.  

Platform: Android and iOS
Stockists: Visit the store linked to your device
Expect to pay: A free download

Scanner Pro
It is a digital world, with everything needing to be digitised so it can be stored and accessed at a later stage. Many documents also need to be in a digital format so they can be audited. Scanner Pro turns a smartphone or tablet into a professional scanner. Users can scan anything from travel receipts to invoices and apply filters to make them as clear as possible. The app automatically crops a scan to fit on a page, should it need to be printed, and detects the edges of the page being scanned. Scans are saved as PDFs and can be e-mailed or printed directly from the app.  

Platform: iOS, although similar apps are available for BlackBerry, Windows Phone 8 and Android
Stockists: www.readdle.com
Expect to pay: R75

Dragon Dictation
There have been numerous dictation programmes over the years, but Dragon Dictate has been the best since it launched a decade or so ago for PC. The iOS app is no different in that its speech recognition is extremely accurate, especially when concentrating and properly pronouncing words. It saves a lot of time when used instead of the phone or tablet’s keyboard to tap out an email. Besides creating documents, emails and notes, the latest version of the app lets users post updates to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and it has an option to set reminders.  

Platform: iOS and Android
Stockists: Visit the store linked to your device
Expect to pay: A free download – Gadget.co.za