This week’s Smart Health features an app that coaches you to get healthy, a new health tracker for your pet, and an app store for prescribed health apps.

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Vida’s digital coaches

A new app helps people get fit and monitorS their health without the need for a doctor’s visit. Called Vida, the app integrates with Apple Inc.’s HealthKit and provides users a personal coach to help lose weight, detoxify, lower cholesterol and blood pressure, prevent diabetes and reduce stress.

Users choose the type of coach needed to achieve their fitness goals. Available coaches include a Cheerleader, Listener, Drill Sergeant, Innovator, Analyzer, and Challenger.

One other goal of Vida is to aid the recovery process for those with debilitating diseases, partnering with Duke Medicine for a cardiac rehab program, and MD Anderson Cancer Center to monitor leukemia patients who underwent stem cell transplant. There are no immediate plans to have doctors prescribe the use of Vida, but if the program proves to be successful, more people may be encouraged to get directly involved in their health plan.

Vida is available for iPhone users and costs nothing to download, but there is a subscription fee of $15 a week to have 24/7 access to coaches.

PetPace tracks pet health

PetPace LLC released a smart collar that goes by the same name to help pet owners know when their pets aren’t feeling well. PetPace’s sensors continuously monitors a pet’s temperature, pulse, respiration, activity, positions and calories. The data can be accessed using a mobile app or through a web portal.

By knowing these parameters, pet owners will immediately know if there’s something wrong thanks to indicators like idleness, loss of appetite, a spike in temperature and increased or decreased pulse or respiration even while resting.

PetPace data can also be shared with vets to consolidate and analyze pet history.

PetPace is available for pre-order for $150 and is available in small, medium and large sizes. There’s an annual subscription plan that costs $180. PetPace will start shipping in a couple of weeks.

NHS-prescribed app store

The U.K. government is said to be looking into a strategy that would make improving citizens’ health much more accessible by the people. The government is planning for a National Health Service app store which features applications that can be prescribed by doctors to help people lose weight, monitor their health, or exercise more.

Tim Kelsey, NHS England’s national director of patients and information, stated that this program will not only be beneficial for people but also for developers. App makers can develop software to be approved with the NHS seal, marking to citizens the most trustworthy of health apps.

photo credit: ~db~ via photopin cc