Top 25 Google Android Apps for Public Health Professionals
By July 2010, Android still lacked in the app department, if you compare it to big-name developers such as Apple. But, the Android app market is growing, as more developers are pushing toward the Android 2.2 “Froyo,” which includes Adobe Flash 10.1. The following top 25 Google Android apps for public health professionals include health apps, communication apps and apps that could make any public health professional’s work and social life more convenient.
Health and Safety Apps
- Calorie Counter by FatSecret: This is a simple tool that can be used in conjunction with the Fast Food Calorie Counter listed below.
- Control of Communicable Diseases Manual for Mobile + Web: Control of Communicable Diseases Manual for Mobile + Web is ideal for public health workers and includes up-to-date information from the American Public Health Association (APHA) on identifying, managing, and preventing hundreds of infectious diseases, as well as news feeds and links to journal abstracts and citations.
- Fast Food Calorie Counter: Use this app for yourself or to teach others how to eat healthy when they eat out and eat cheap. This app can help you mitigate the disastrous effects of too many fried, mayonnaise-drenched, delicious snacks.
- First Aid: Do you know the Heimlich maneuver? Do you know CPR? If you have First Aid by your side, you’ll never have to wonder if you’ll know what to do when something horrible happens.
- Fring for Android: This is the first Voip app for Android, allowing users to make free Skype, Google Talk, MSN, or SIP calls from any phone. It works just as expected, over EDGE, 3G, or Wi-Fi. Twitter also is integrated.
- iMobile Care: This is an innovative first aid app that serves as a quick reference guide, while also providing location map, imaging, alarm and personalized features. It shows users how to deliver first aid during serious events such as accidents, choking, injuries, traumas, swine flu, burns, H1N1 among many critical situations.
- Life360 Mobile: With a single touch of a button, check in and send an emergency “I’m safe” or “I need help” alert that we’ll broadcast to your entire family with Life360′s emergency messaging system. Because they send your message as a phone call, text message, and email, they can get your alert out in almost all circumstances.
- Outbreaks Near Me: Created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with the Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, the application lets users track and report outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as H1N1 (swine flu), with their mobile phones in real time.
- Safe Respond: Safe Respond is an Android home screen widget that, when activated, automatically responds to any incoming SMS messages with a customizable response.
- Safety Net: When most emergency solutions require you to click buttons to activate an alert, SafetyNet’s goal is to create innovative solutions to make calling for help as simple as shaking your phone, even if the application is not running.
Communication Apps
- Call Confirm: Also listed in the Android App store, this app raises up a confirm dialog on any calls. Number, photo and contact name on the incoming call help with your decision.
- chompSMS: The interactive interface in this communications app includes chat style SMS bubbles, touchscreen keyboards and many other great features. The app is free, and they charge the same price per SMS message sent to any supported country in the world via the chompSMS network.
- Fusion Voicemail Plus: This is a free service that lists all your voicemail messages on your SmartPhone screen from your mobile, home, office and any other voicemail box. You can scroll, listen to, call back and delete voicemails in the order of your choice.
- Phonebook 2.0: Voxmobili combines instant messaging, social networks and life streaming applications into one single app. Phonebook 2.0 displays relevant contextual information to the end-user about their contacts such as location, up and coming birthdays, missed calls and status updates.
- Steel: This app offers a new, touch-friendly user interface to the Android browser engine. It supports auto-rotation, full screen browsing, a virtual keyboard, advanced touch controls for zooming and flipping through multiple windows. Steel provides full integration with the Android platform.
- Translator: A simple and free app that allows you to translate words, phrases, sentences and whole paragraphs of text between different languages. The app uses Google’s language translation service. It can even detect your source language and flip between source and translation phrase.
- Yellow Pages: Download Yellowbook’s free app now to gain access to millions of business listings, with phone numbers, addresses, store hours and more. This app contains Google Maps and Street View and you can save searches to contacts.
Convenience Apps
- AP Mobile: Get a steady stream of news from your city or state, view AP news videos and more. This app is better than a single-source news source, as AP Mobile lets you choose what you want to know from every news category you can imagine. Developed by The Associated Press for Android.
- Astrid 2.11.0: Simply one of the best task lists around, with a recording dashboard and the ability to tag tasks, set priorities, and assign dates and several levels of reminders. Includes a stopwatch-like timer and syncs with Remember the Milk. By the time you read this, version 3.0 may have been released.
- Better Keyboard: If you’re all thumbs or if a small keyboard frustrates you, consider this app. It has many usability enhancements, including a multi-lingual option, auto-suggest dictionary and a speech input update.
- HandyCalc: This may be the only calculator you’ll ever need. Includes automatic suggestion and solving, which makes it easier to learn and use. Use this tool for currency conversion, unit conversion, statistics, variables and time calculations.
- OI File Manager: If you want to stay organized, this OpenIntents file manager allows you to browse your SD card, create directories, rename, move, and delete files. It also acts as an extension to other applications to display “Open” and “Save” dialogs.
- Voice Recorder: Record to an SD card and send data as attached file via Gmail along with timer & background recording. You can search by title and date, set recordings as ringtones and more.
- Weather Channel: Know the weather before you head out the door. With the Weather Channel app, you just need wireless capacity to access severe weather warnings, forecasts and radar maps for your location and for across the world.
- Where: This is an all-in-one app that provides you with anything you need and tells you how to get there. Hotel? Coffee? The closest government office? It’s all here, including weather, traffic and headlines.
