Apps for health and healthcare are pulling in VC notice. Wall Street Journal profiles Azumio:

Azumio is the latest in a growing category of medical devices that attach to or work in conjunction with an iPhone or other smartphone. The mobile health-and-fitness category is also exploding with devices like Fitbitand Jawbone’s forthcoming UP product. Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration said earlier this month it was exploring new regulations for evaluating mobile apps.

While some are focusing on devices that plug into or communicate wirelessly with a smartphone, Bostjancic says Azumio is focused for now on uses that require only a smartphone and its built-in sensors. “With the app, you can reach just a huge audience,” he said. The heart-rate monitor uses a smartphone’s camera to determine one’s heart rate by measuring the differences in light absorption as blood is coming in and out of the tissue in the finger.

Bostjancic said that there are other sensors in the phone that can help us be more aware of what our body is or isn’t doing at any time. In large part, he said, most chronic diseases are caused by lifestyle. That’s a problem, given how detached most people are from what is going on with their bodies. Technology is part of the problem, but also part of the solution.

Azumio, he said, “would like to put you back in touch with your body.”

Next up for Azumio are apps that perform stress checks. Bostjancic notes that stress is often the trigger for all manner of lifestyle-related disease. “We would like to address this by quantifying the level of stress,” he said.

TechCrunch has the story: 

As we’ve written in the past, Drchrono, a startup thatsimplifies the professional lives of doctors by bringing electronic health records and much more to the iPad, has received official government certification. This is will result in doctors receiving $44,000 in incentives when they use drchrono as an electronic medical records platform.

As we’ve written in the past, drchrono’s iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, dictate notes via audio, take pictures, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and, most importantly input electronic health records.

The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. Drchrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process. Because of this, the startup has been awarded aMeaningful Use certification, which allows doctors to receive up to $44,000 in government incentives for downloading the apps and using it enough to meet the Government’s requirement. The drchrono application tracks how much a doctor uses the EHR and automatically gives them key metrics to report to the government in order to get their incentive money for 2011.

I've been saying for some time now that Apple should not retire the iPod brand. Rather, re-focus and re-position it.

I believe that with Apple's customer base, iTunes and App Store ecosystem, amazing design skills and personal computing and personal wireless device making expertise, that iPod offers Apple a huge opportunity to become the premier brand and platform for all the (simple, integated) tools, devices, services, accessories, databases and software for fantastic, high-margin "body computing".

Which is now what Jawbone is working on:

Just an hour ago on stage at TED Global, Jawbone announced the grand project they've been quietly working on for years: A wearable band called Up, which is infused with sensors and smartphone connected, allowing you to track your eating, sleeping, and activity patterns.

The Up's sensors collect data about how much you've been sleeping and how much you've been moving. That data is then fed into a smartphone app, which also takes in information about your meals. (You enter meal data manually, in part by taking pictures of what you've eaten.) Based on all that information, the smartphone program provides "nudges" meant to help you live healthier, day by day. For example, if you haven't slept much, when you wake up the app might suggest a high-protein breakfast and an extra glass of water.

Kevin Keller has an overview of the "quantifiable self" movement:

About 400 people interested in serious self-tracking meet for the inaugural Quantified Selfconference in May this year. Self-tracking means monitoring quantities like your weight, sleep, location, messages, genes, body chemistry, performance, productivity, or any other of a thousand metrics. Self-trackers arrived from all over the world to share and explore the whys and hows of self-tracking. Self knowledge through numbers we call it. This emerging habit is being propelled by advances in cheap sensors, cheap communication, easier data tools, and our own interest in optimizing our bodies and minds. There are nowQuantified Self meetups in 10 countries, and over 200 startup companies in the field. Equally significant, a number of high profile venture capitalists attended the conference, indicating the movement might have reach some kind of threshold.

Through technology we are engineering our lives and bodies to be more quantifiable. We are embedding sensors in our bodies and in our environment in order to be able to quantify all kinds of functions. Just as science has been a matter of quantification -- something doesn't count unless we can measure it -- now our personal lives are becoming a matter of quantification. So the next century will be one ongoing march toward making nearly every aspect of our personal lives -- from exterior to interior -- more quantifiable. There is both a whole new industry in that shift as well as a whole new science, as well as a whole new lifestyle. There will be new money, new tools, and new philosophy stemming from measuring your whole life. Lifelogging some call it. It will be the new normal.

Good stuff. And, I believe, this is/should be the future of iPod. 

iPod lives by becoming the brand name, the platform, the tools, sensors and accessories to allow *hundreds of millions* of people to quantify and review and share massive data about themselves.

The iPod brand is solid, but becoming marginalized. However, consider what Apple can bring to this tiny but growing market:

a history of the absolute best, most intuitive, easiest to set up and use personal mobile computing devices fully integrated with other (Apple) tools and devices

That's not nothing, my friends. 

And we can instantly share/post every movement, every result, every bite we eat, via Twitter. And learn about these cool new devices at the Apple Store. And store them in the cloud.

This is a market waiting to happen. And, I think, the smarpthone will be a part of it: always on, always on, always with us; appropriate apps and sensors. But, I think iPod becomes the brand for all the tools and accessories this new market will demand.