A little yellow fly that lays parasitic eggs is actually the inspiration for a next-gen hearing aid. Its complex “ear” near the base of the front legs responds to male cricket calls, and is the model for tiny microphones. Two or more microphones detecting the pressure changes in sound waves are better for hearing aids, but the smaller and closer the microphones, the harder it is to accurately detect those waves. The mechanics of the MEMS microphone design come directly from the fly, and new research scheduled to be presented at the International Congress of Acoustics in June shows that by tweaking certain parameters, the prototype hearing aid can be made much smaller than conventional ones, with a greater tolerance to noise.

Of more immediate impact are hearing aid apps for smartphones, which contain the microphone, processor, and headphones needed for a hearing aid at a fraction of the cost of a separate device. Hearing aid apps with diverse features and prices are available, but one recent app that stands out is BioAid, a free and open source hearing aid.

The difference with BioAid is that its algorithm performs compression and amplification selectively across different frequency bands, instead of a uniform gain across all frequencies, like turning up the volume. Since it was built by hearing researchers in the U.K., it has been lab tested with real hearing-impaired volunteers. With the app’s sliders, users can adjust and save filters for different background noise levels. Plus, the phone’s touchscreen and charger save users from the tiny-battery-fat-fingers dilemma.

On a regulatory note, the Food and Drug Administration is paying close attention to mobile health services, which may explain why some apps shun the “hearing aid” label or are plastered with heavy disclaimers. Congressional hearings in March were a prelude to upcoming new FDA guidelines on smartphone and mobile health apps; 75 apps have been approved so far.

The bulky cochlear implant, one of the great successes of sensory prosthetics, is also getting a makeover. Georgia Tech researchers, for example, have developed a thin film electrode array that flexes to fit the tiny, two-millimeter diameter cochlear surface to better stimulate the auditory nerve. This still needs to be connected to a battery, microphones, and processor; the externally visible part of conventional cochlear implants. A fully internal system, trialed by industry leader Cochlear in 2007, means users never have to remove it to swim, sleep, or shower. The downside with an internal microphone, apparently, is that you can really hear your chewing and heartbeat, but with signal processing this effect can be mitigated.

With the cost of conventional implants being reduced by upstarts like Nurotron thanks to cheap manufacturing and fast-tracked regulatory approval in China, and biotech providing new materials and designs, a true bionic ear (3D printed of course) may be arriving at the speed of sound.

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On Monday, athenahealth said it will pay $293 million for the mobile health company, which marks a 22 percent premium over Epocrates’ closing price on Jan. 4.

On a conference call with investors, analysts and journalists, athenahealth CEO and co-founder Jonathan Bush said that the company has long been looking for a way to gain awareness among physicians. In Epocrates, which says it reaches more than 330,000 doctors with its iOS, Android and BlackBerry apps, Bush said, “we believe we have found a breakthrough.”

“We have so much to give doctors,” Bush said. “And so few know who we are.”

Epocrates, which was founded in 1998, initially offered doctors a Palm Pilot-based free drug reference resource. When it transitioned to iOS, the app quickly became a hit, reaching 2,230 downloads per day, Bush said. Athena estimates that 90 percent of doctors are familiar with the app, with about half using it regularly.

Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth was founded in 1997 and provides hospitals with cloud-based medical billing and patient records services.  Assuming the deal closes, athenahealth will look to Epocrates as a way to extend the company’s name recognition and give doctors a “light” entry point for the service, Bush said.  Beyond using the app for marketing, he said Epocrates will integrate with its electronic records service athenaClinicals so that doctors will be able look up Epocrates drug information straight from Athena’s software, initiate processing the prescription and complete other tasks.

Now, he said, Epocrates is like a “Yelp” for drugs, providing doctors with quick summaries on safety information, interactions and side effects. But, Bush said, in the future, it could be more like an interactive “OpenTable” for drugs, as well as other procedures.

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Five months after it debuted an app for iOS, the team at Fitbit has followed up with a version for Android smartphones and tablets. The free software works on Android 2.1 or better and works in conjunction with the Fitbit Wireless Tracker, a small $99 sensor that tracks steps, flights of stairs walked, and hours of sleep.

Fitbit’s new app doesn’t actually track any activity, but instead lets users view their Fitbit stats on the go. All tracking data is handled by Fitbit’s wearable hardware, which syncs to a user’s account on a Windows PC or Mac computer. So this free software doesn’t take the place of the $99 sensor; it simply offers a convenient method to view activity and sleep data.

Still, this doesn’t mean the new Fitbit app isn’t handy and useful by itself. The software does assist with monitoring food and water intake. By tracking daily calories within the app, the Fitbit software tells you how many more calories you have available left in your daily, healthy limit and if you need to be drinking more water.

Fitbit’s sensor and new app are part of a growing trend: Smarter, connected devices are building a market for health-monitoring. ABI Research recently estimated this to be a $400 million industry by 2016; up from $120 million this year. As more mobile apps are created to use internal phone sensors or low-powered external gadgets, the smartphone will continue to be the core device for the web, apps and even our health.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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First, the basics: The Eatery app lets you snap photos of your food each time you eat, and self-rate how healthy each snack and meal is on a scale from “Fit” to “Fat.” The app also lets you share your meal data with others and encourage them to rate and comment on the healthfulness of your eating habits.

In the two days since the app debuted in the Apple App Store, Eatery has already received ratings on more than 200,000 meals, Raskin tells us, which means the company already has a big data set on what, when and how people are eating. And though on the surface Eatery seems like a fun and simple app, there’s serious potential that comes with it, Raskin says:

“We can take all this data and make it actionable. Want to know where to go for a healthy meal? With people from around the world rating meals, it turns out that we have some data that nobody else has.”

Not surprisingly, the app has proven especially popular in San Francisco and New York, two densely populated cities with a critical mass of iPhone users, early adopters and health-conscious people to whom Eatery should especially appeal. Massive Health has made two heatmaps to represent data the Eatery app has compiled so far in these cities:

Eatery app data in NYC (click to enlarge)

Eatery app data in SF (click to enlarge)

It’s cool to see Massive Health already forming strategies to use the data it is amassing. Often startups focus all their attention on attracting users and meeting their immediate needs, and worry about processing all the valuable information they collect much later — if they get around to it at all. Massive Health’s behavior makes sense, though, in light of the fact that the company has been backed by folks known for both deep pockets and deep interest in big picture ideas: Its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Discovery Fund, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Felicis VC and Charles River Ventures. It will be interesting to see how Massive Health moves forward with Eatery, and what apps come from the company in the future.

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Resilient’s technology is targeted at enabling the transfer of health records and other related information safely and securely over the Internet, CEO Kirk Loevner told me in an interview this week. The company has developed three proprietary software products that make up what it calls a “trust network” to allow healthcare providers to transfer information over the web.

Resilient, which started building its technology four years ago, has thus far funded its operations with angel investment money. The company will use its new backing to expand its development team and move toward full deployment of its products, Loevner said.

Resilient claims its technology gives the company an edge over other players in the medical records transfer space. “We actually have a very unique approach to this problem,” Loevner said. “All the traditional solutions out there trying to do health information exchange are really about point-to-point integrations, which doesn’t scale well on a national level, or Software-as-a-Service approaches, which can have trust and security issues.” With Resilient’s cloud-based distributed network model, each data owner can set the policy around who accesses what information, and the data can be easily brought up for auditing and metering purposes, he said.

According to Loevner, Resilient has built a generalized technology platform that could have applications in media, government, and defense. Resilient decided to focus its efforts on optimizing for the healthcare field because it’s an area sorely in need of tech innovation. “Healthcare is such a huge market, and it’s the most broken when it comes to information exchange,” Loevner said. “It was truly ripe for change.”

Indeed, although the healthcare industry’s adoption of technology is still in the nascent stages, the tech industry has started to take note of the current market opportunity in the space. With America’s aging population bringing a bigger focus on healthcare innovation, more tech startups, and more venture capital investors, are sure to crop up to meet the growing demand to bring hospitals into the 21st century.

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Though still a somewhat loosely defined term, The World Health Organization calls mHealth “an area of electronic health (eHealth)” that is “the provision of health services and information via mobile technologies such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).” Mobile Health Initiative (mHI) founder Peter Waegemann, in speaking at the mHI event in Washington, D.C. this year, said that mHealth “focuses on behavioral and structural changes.” Whereas eHealth is focused on technology to drive the change, “the vision for mHealth includes collecting data through text, images, emails and supporting patient-hood. As more and more connected devices come to market, we expect the definition of mHealth to broaden in scope.

Where are mobile health apps making an impact? The iPad is one area. The device’s high-resolution screen allows for diagnosis through the use of medical imaging applications. Stanford University School of Medicine, for instance, is now using the device for instruction with first-year medical students. Others are using the device to combine electronic medical records (EMRs) with a range of other clinical tools, and we may see more use of the iPad as EMR devices and medical imaging converge to create a platform for a physician-patient interface.

On the consumer side of the industry, smartphones are impacting behavioral change in patients: A growing number of apps exist that help individuals track nutritional and fitness levels, and patients can often use this data to link, via social networking, to individuals with similar health goals and/or illnesses. Social networking-related projects are growing by the day, in fact. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, co-sponsors TuAnalyze, a site for tracking, sharing and analyzing data on hemoglobin A1c levels by diabetics. The site’s mapping tools allow users to see how their geographic area matches up with other regions of the country. The use of an online social network is mobilized to encourage diabetics to monitor themselves and motivate individuals in their region or neighborhood to do the same.

The key question is how much are people willing to pay for these applications, and who will use the data to drive behavioral change in a manner that makes economic sense. Research on everything from cardiovascular disease to asthma is showing the connection between the environment and health outcomes. An early signal of what might be possible in this space is the platform Asthmapolis. Asthmapolis is a GPS inhaler-tracker app that enables users to track their own asthma conditions. The technology contributes to the public health understanding of the connections between asthma and place (where environmental triggers may be greater in some locations versus others).

If we think about mHealth in a more expansive manner, we can see how the insights from psychology, behavioral economics, persuasive technologies and neurology can be used to inform app development in ways that could revolutionize how we think about behavioral change. For the most part, the paradigms used in the health care arena for behavioral change remain woefully behind the times. What development of mHealth apps could inadvertently do is open a space for cross-fertilization of the health sciences with other disciplines — neuroanthropology, persuasive technology and behavioral economics, for instance. It could also have more impact on how we think about behavioral change for health as much as technology itself.

Read the full report here.