Alizul: INFOGRAPHIC: HOW YOUR SMARTPHONE CAN MAKE YOU HEALTHIER

How Your Smartphone Can Make You Healthier
By Brydon McCluskey, Who Is Hosting This, 18 May 2015.

Is technology helping to make us healthier - or just the opposite?

Looking around, you’d probably guess the latter. Worldwide, obesity rates have more than doubled since 1980, with almost 2 billions adults classified as overweight in 2014. As technology develops and automates more and more tasks, people are living increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Not getting enough exercise increases your risk of health problems including cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, anxiety and depression, and even certain types of cancers.

With that in mind, the steady march of technological progress seems like it might do more harm than good. Why go outside and exercise when you’re surrounded by entertainment at home? The United States now boasts an average of 5.7 Internet-connected devices per household.

We’re constantly surrounded by screens, and not just at home. Around the world, mobile devices outnumber people. Could the ubiquity of smartphones be a contributing factor in our worsening health?

Smartphones almost certainly impact our social health as people prefer to stare at their screens instead of making conversation or even eye contact. But has our addiction to playing Angry Birds, instead of going outside and seeing real ones, contributed to a decline in our physical health as well?

In fact, the opposite may be true. The increasing ubiquity of smartphones has also given rise to a booming smartphone healthcare industry.

Thanks to new smartphone apps and other developing new technology, anyone can now monitor their heart rate, track diet and exercise routine, and keep an eye on their blood sugar levels without complicated or expensive equipment. Going forward, experts predict that smartphone health apps will “reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients.”

How can you put your smartphone to work to improve your own health?

Check out the graphic below for the best health apps for iOS and Android, plus new fitness devices that put the power of technology work for you.