New asthma app: Track your wheezing and coughing in Google Health

Ringful, a company making a series of health-related applications for the iPhone, has just launched one that tracks your asthma symptoms — and it lets you track it all in an online account at Google Health.

It’s another sign that enterprise mobile apps could come on strong in the future; called Asthma Journal, the application is the first app integration with Google Health. It is also just the latest in a series of applications that allow you to easily push a button to input data, which in turn is tracked on a server and which then can interact with other applications. In this case, you can report things like whether you are wheezing, coughing or tight in the chest, and the degree of seriousness of each symptom.

It then sends your entries to your profile at Google Health, where patients can then have a place they can refer their doctors to consult their daily entries. Such recordings are often asked by doctors of their asthma patients. Carrying a pen and paper around to record such problems is a drag. Since you’re probably already carrying your phone, it’s easy to whip out and push a button on it instead.

Ringful was one of the seven application-makers that competed in our MobileBeat Top Startup Competition last month. This asthma application was submitted days before the conference, but Apple has only just now approved it. It is free, and available here.

Chief executive Michael Yuan said the next update of the app will feature Microsoft HealthVault integration. Yuan then says he wants to provide integration with Dossia, to allow employers and insurers to pay for preventive monitoring programs enabled by these types of applications.