Mobile Health Technology: From Daily Care and Pandemics to their Energy Consumption and Environmental Impact

Mobile health technology is a rapidly growing field with numerous promises to make substantial impact in our lives. To open this special issue, which brings to you many exciting research results in mobile health technology, we discuss two important aspects of this technology. One is how they can be integrated in our daily lives as important care devices, especially during periods such as the more and more frequent pandemics around the world. Having discussed their advantages, we calculate their estimated footprint in the energy consumption and dioxide carbon they produce globally. With that we raise awareness and invite researchers to work on reducing their energy consumption to ensure that they maintain a low footprint even if their numbers explodes in the near future. We finish this article with a brief teaser of the papers published in this special issue and wish you a good read.