About 11 percent of all mobile phone users and 19 percent of smartphone users have at least one health app on their device, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project's Mobile Health 2012 survey, which the group published this morning. The percentage of mobile phone users who have downloaded a health app has remained unchanged since 2010.

Forty-five percent of the 3,014 adults surveyed said they used a smartphone. Pew’s Associate Director Susannah Fox, who wrote the report, likened this smartphone tipping point to the adoption of broadband Internet back in 2003. In both cases, adoption happened quickly and fundamentally changed the way users engaged with the online world.

"Mobile seems to increase people’s likelihood to participate," Fox told MobiHealthNews. "It’s the smartphone owners that I ended up really focusing on in the analysis, because they’re so much more likely to use [their devices] to access health information."

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