There's something rather resilient about the English language - it does a pretty good job of shrugging off silliness. I've noticed a decline in geek-inflicted bastardizations, such as adding 2.0 to anything (yes, guilty as charged) and removing vowels from company names. In today's post-crash world Twittr and Facebk would seem too flimsy.

So too, I predict the 'm' as in mHealth will soon go the way of the 'e' in ecommerce. Recently mHealth discussions have been shifting from the technology (doctors and patients using mobile phones and sensors) to what I think is the most important point - improving patients' service quality and reducing society's costs.

Two recent reports each make (at least) one important point. The first from Research2Guidance talks about the potential for cost savings for integrating mobile solutions, primarily due to better compliance (this graph reprinted by mobilemarketing watch, I don't have $2k to buy my own copy). Diabetes is the clear 'winner' here, and big pharma should be embracing this and driving the change to efficiency.

The second report mentioned in the article is the mHealth report from mobilestorm that provides a readable snapshot of the market and provides a useful summary of the different elements that make up mHealth today:

There are currently eight broad areas of the mHealth market, including general monitoring, personal emergency response systems (PERS), telemedicine, mobile medical equipment, RFID tracking, health and fitness software, mobile messaging and electronic medical records.

Moving on from narrow definitions of mhealth towards broad related categories is part of growing up. Before long the conversation will be less peppered with distracting and ill-fitting monikers, and be more about improving service quality and reducing costs, with technology just as assumed, ubiquitous and invisible as oxygen in the air. Or homeless dudes in San Francisco.

Good use case in the Washington Post for mobiles as a way to speed up diagnosis and accelerate treatment. 

Physicians use photos from patients' cellphones to deliver 'mobile health'

The other day I got hit on the head by a big chunk of timber in a garage - and having the ability to send a picture of the wound to the 911 operator who asked me to describe the cut ("I don't know, it's on the top of my head")  would make sense. 

It seems to be pretty accurate:

"The initial data is encouraging," Sikka said. The study will continue through October, but so far, he says, about 90 percent of diagnoses are accurate. Sikka said camera phones with at least three megapixels, autoflash and autofocus work well.

Sometimes, however, the picture quality is poor or the patient information is not specific enough. Fifty percent of the cases where the doctor did not make an accurate diagnosis involved images that Sikka said were too grainy.

So, when high quality cameras become ubiquitous, look for accuracy rates for remote diagnoses to get up towards 95% - pretty good considering the alternative. 

There are no shortage of predictions about what this year will bring for mobile, so at the risk of piling on a bolted bandwagon here are a few more. Not exhaustive by any means, more of a selection of some of my favorites.

1. Celebrities figure out how to monetize social media, even if social media doesn't.

If Kim Kardashian can get $10k for a single Twit, how much could someone with a broader following and even greater respect coin? Lots of outrage and fuss predicted (can you trust anyone?), but the market will reward credible endorsements, and affiliate technology will enable both transparency and revenue.

Location-based posts and pics/ videos submitted via mobile will be a big part of this, as the mundanities of daily life are manna from heaven to the celebrity obsessed.

2. Developers expand focus from the device to the hardware ecosystem

A big challenge until now has been making it easy and reliable for phones to make calls, send texts, browse the web and download apps. Thankfully this is more or less a solved problem, so I suspect part of the battle will shift to the hardware ecosystem. People will start to integrate mobility into their physical environment - TVs, thermometers, speed cameras and sensors will become part of the extended operating system. Creative developers for Apple are already straining at the leash; first flashlights, spirit levels and compasses, and now blowers and handwarmers take us beyond the digital to the physical environment.

Look for big growth in the m2m market and intriguing modular hardware initiatives like Nokia's NOTA, Aduino and BugLabs and a fun new concept out of Portland, Green Goose (thanks Rob!).

In addition, companies like Nokia and RIM/Blackberry who are overdue for an operating system upgrade could take this opportunity to leapfrog even even Palm's fabulously slick WebOS and ensure their next OS is integrated more tightly into the physical environment.

3. Mobile augmented reality as a new search interface

Continuing the theme of moving beyond the phone, here we'll see the the overlay of digital intelligence with the real world. Google Goggles is an important validation - and gives them the advantage of having an alternative search trigger (their location algorithms deliver the search term, rather than the keyboard). This is a new enabler for many services that can overlay digital with physical, and there are some intriguing proof of concepts popping up like mushrooms, subway finders, interior design and ski slopes.

Bruce Sterling's speech at Layar's launch provides a good summary of the state of play and potential here.

Video: Bruce Sterling's Keynote - At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on Vimeo.

4. Health goes online and mobile at the same time

Healthcare eats up massive amounts of consumers' attention,' powerpoint ink and investment dollars (the second quarter of 09 saw more VC investment in healthcare than in IT). Professional-grade startups such as AmericanWell are quickly dismantling barriers to online health such as onerous insurance liability, online doctor-patient relationships and restrictions on cross-border medicine. At the same time Congress is on the verge of throwing another 30m uninsured Americans into the system who will need cheap yet effective treatment, and the shortage of primary care physicians is set to increase. I predict mobile as platform of choice here - more secure and personal than a computer and able to take, send and store pictures, sounds and videos of questionable body parts, and deliver location-based services that will help patients find services easier.

Every year for the past few years has been billed as the year that mobile will break through. As AdMob and Quattro proved late last year - 2009 was actually the year for mobile, but it came and went. Mobile is no longer another place, it is all around us, like the Internet now is. I think 2010 will be the year that mobile starts to integrate with the physical world to deliver genuine user benefits (such as saving lives) as well as more trivial ones (such as Kim K painting her nails). Either way, a busy time for innovation ahead.

I don't know Omar, but I've known employee number 2 at Admob Russell Buckley (one half of the MobHappy gang) - for a number of years. Wonderful result for him and the team, and a lesson for me. I've spent a lot of time thinking up fancy-schmancy new mobile advertising paradigms, most of which are gathering dust in powerpoint archives, whereas these guys "just" went out and built something that is simple to describe (banner and text ads on mobile websites) and they crucially, executed well, with smart advisors. Seven hundred and fifty million proof points that execution matters sooo much more than ideas.

So if I ever find myself going down the startup route, and i) what I do can't be described in 7 words or less and ii) executing to those 7 words is not what every employee spends all their time doing, someone please shoot me.

Morgan Stanley Internet guru Mary Meeker presented her much-anticipated annual Internet trends talk at the Web2.0 Summit yesterday. This is the first time (she's been at this about a decade) that she's finally seen this to be the year of the mobile Internet, and spends most of the slides on that.

Couldn't agree more, in particular with these:

- Social networking on the mobile driving major changes in communication and providing new commerce opportunities.
- Mobile internet will create big material winners and losers in shareholder value.

Interesting, data-rich and worth a read, though I thought there could have been more about the explosion of mobile as the first Internet device for the next 1bn Internet users in developing countries.

The recently announced acquisition of German startup Cellity was completed today. Good news for Nokia as it takes us towards a goal we have had for a while - getting more out of the most important social network that you own (ie the contacts book on your phone) by connecting it with the new breed of social networks that are today better at leveraging the many faceted advantages of the web as a platform.

Welcome the @cellity team, and congrats to my colleague Ed (@simnett) and the team, who disproved that myth that nothing gets done in July.