Location, meet healthcare

Now that Facebook is jumping on the location bandwagon expect to see more integration of location to web services.

It's about time - the most glaring gap for web services has been their lack of a clue when it comes to location. The web can't really help you live a richer life if you need to be chained to your desktop. As we get more comfortable using location in web services, and more of our healthcare moves online, look for more of our health-services to be location aware. 

[Another data point that support this - mHealth devices (mobile health related gadgets, some of which will be location-centric) will be coming to high street stores.] 

The recent review by ReadWriteWeb outlines a few of these, and one thought in particular stands out: 

Putting a few thousand dollars of monitoring equipment into a home, if it prevents someone from visiting an emergency room, it pays for itself with the avoidance of one visit.

This is a powerful idea, and relates to an area that was not discussed much - proactive health. As Esther Dyson said in a Health2.0 Meetup I went to the other day, Health2.0 is about health, not just healthcare. Monitoring of people's activities and behaviors and identifying outliers (combination of activity, genetic makeup and protein markers in the blood) could help identify early onset of diseases and keep people out of hospital in the first place.