According to a Commonwealth Fund study, the average American visits the doctor only four times per year and that number is declining. One of the drivers behind this behavioral change is accessibility to medical information.

Here’s a great example – in a study of millennials by ZocDoc, it was reported that this group is more likely to research symptoms online, with 28% self-diagnosing and 36% self-medicating before seeing a doctor.

When patients only see doctors when they’re sick or injured, it impacts the overall quality of care they could receive. With a more complete view of a patient, healthcare professionals can provide in-depth care and counsel that focuses on overall wellness or even detect the onset of a chronic condition.

Creating a connected health experience that’s ingrained in patients’ daily lives is one solution, and the need has never been greater to help doctors and hospital systems support their patients digitally.

Our team at Perficient developed DailyDose, a patient engagement app built on Adobe Experience Manager Mobile. With a solution that aligns with consumer/patient behaviors, this will support lowering patient readmissions, driving lower healthcare costs and increasing patient engagement.

Watch the video for a peek at DailyDose.

See how Adobe Experience Manager Mobile can help you build engaging mobile moments, and register for one of the upcoming AEM Mobile Roadshow events.

Washington, D.C. | July 14, 2016

Chicago, IL | July 19, 2016

Recently, Adobe introduced AEM Mobile, a new way to build, maintain and deploy mobile apps. AEM Mobile makes it vastly easier to manage mobile apps by enabling marketers to maintain mobile app content, which has traditionally been done by developers. AEM Mobile is the centerpiece of a new platform Adobe has built around enabling marketing to maintain mobile apps and market to mobile app users.

As one of Adobe’s top partners, Perficient had a chance to preview AEM Mobile and get a glimpse into the technology underlying this new platform.

The Tech Behind the Scenes

This new platform is composed of several different technologies, each of which has been deeply integrated, to build a seamless mobile app publishing experience.

Bringing it all Together

By combining all of these technologies into a single platform, Adobe has created a mobile app platform with unparalleled features, flexibility and ease of use. No longer should mobile apps be separate from the rest of your digital marketing technology or should they be unmeasured or un-marketed. By leveraging, AEM Mobile you can build and maintain more apps and derive more value out of every dollar you put into mobile.

Perficient is extremely excited by the possibilities offered by AEM Mobile and for Adobe Summit, we have some very special demos planned to demonstrate the potential of the platform. Stay tuned for the second part of this blog series for more information!

This study highlights some important data about mobile usage, including the following:

• Tablets have overtaken phones in the amount of traffic they drive. Think about that. Modern tablets were introduced in 2010. In just 2+ years, they have taken over smartphone traffic.
• In the Retail industry, tablets are preferred, while in Telecom phones are preferred by a wide margin.
• Since February 2012, iOS has overtaken Android (again) for browsing
• Video has grown by 300% on mobile devices, however, the desktop still accounts for almost 90% of video browsing.
• For online shoppers, tablet users are 3 times more likely to buy versus smartphone users.

This is all good data for those people who are targeting mobile devices.  I’m looking forward to more of these types of studies from Adobe.

What is interesting is that the report includes only those companies that have native applications on multiple mobile operating systems and have some sort of cloud-based solution.  Naturally this criteria is going to leave some companies out, like Apple, Microsoft, and RIM who target apps for one mobile OS.

The applications included in this Wave are somewhat of a melting pot.  Adobe’s Connect application is a leader and delivers web-based conferencing.  Comparing that application to Yammer, also a leader but more of a corporate-friendly Facebook, is kind of hard.  Box.com is a file sharing and synchronizing application which is completely different than Connect or Yammer.

Still, the collaboration space is a very broad market consisting of a variety of application types.  It is good to see an evaluation of these different companies not based just on the product they deliver, but on many other factors, such as strategy and market presence.

Forrester rates the leaders in these categories as follows:

• Current Offerings: Box, IBM, and Yammer
• Strategy: Skype, Box, Cisco, and Yammer
• Market Presence: Skype, Cisco, and Google

If you don’t have access to Forrester.com, you can read a quick review of this Wave on CMS Wire here.

Well, two products are trying to help with build once, deploy anywhere: Adobe Flash Builder and IBM Web Experience Factory.  These tools are targeted toward different kinds of developers, but they both have features that ‘easily’ target multiple devices.

Pick iOS in Flash Builder 4

Adobe Flash Builder:  I understand that it is not widely known that Flash Builder will let you build native iOS applications, in addition to Flash and Flex applications.  Holly Shinsky, @devgirlFL, explains how easy it is to use Flash Builder to create iOS applications using Flex/Air, both from Adobe.  Here is a link to the article on her blog:  Flex/AIR for iOS Development Process.

As you can see the image to the right, Apple iOS and Google Android applications can be generated right out of Flash Builder.  Of course, you can’t deploy Flash applications to the iPhone, but Flex applications work fine.

IBM Web Experience Factory:  IBM has just released Web Experience Factory Version 7.0.1.  (Web Experience Factory used to be called Portlet Factory, but since it does so much more than build portlets, IBM wisely changed its name.)    Web Experience Factory now includes Mobile and Multi-Channel support.  This allows you to build one application and deploy it to Portal, WebSphere Application Server and now mobile devices.  Here is a link to the announcement where you can get more details.

Applications built by Web Experience Factory are not native applications, but are web browser based.  Support for mobile devices includes two new, cool features though.  First, Factory uses its Profiling feature to allow you to target various devices in one code base.  By enabling the mobile UI features, your application will tailor itself to various mobile devices, including iOS and Android.  This video shows you how you can build a muli channel application using Facotry: Build multi-channel application in 13 minutes.

The second new feature in Web Experience Factory is the support for many device specific features such as Geolocation, selectable lists, phone numbers, etc.

You can access videos about Web Experience Factory here.

In the following video, Going Moble on Adobe CQ5 ,you get to see how CQ5 lets you view your page on many different mobile devices, which a lot of other vendors offer.  Something I think is more unique to Adobe is that CQ5 let’s you edit the page right in the emulated mobile device, so you can see exactly what happens as you make the changes. 

The image to the right shows the user editing a title on a page destined for a mobile device.  Editing the page right on the emulated device lets you experiment with what works best without the crazy edit/preview cycle in so many other systems.  What you see in the video is that you can edit the image right there as well.

Another nice feature of CQ5 is that you can tailor a page for a mobile device, but also share contents on that page with other devices.  Through a mechanism they call inheritance, you can have a mobile page inherit contents from a regular web page, and then just alter parts of the mobile page.  This helps when the image on the page has to change for the mobile device, but everything else stays the same.  With inheritance, as the page content changes on the web, it will get reflected in the mobile version, but the image will be overridden.

CQ5 also lets you build native applications for various devices, including Android and iOS.  As a developer, CQ5 will let you take advantage of the capabilities of each mobile device to sync content from the web site to the mobile device.

Finally, if you are an iPad user, CQ5 has an optimized authoring tool to allow you to preview and approve content right from your iPad.

The only concern to have with all the MEAP tools is that it’s still the wild west in the mobile development world.   Competing standards, tools, and vendors make it hard to see who the winner will be.  Regardless, Adobe already has a strong start using tools creative designers around the world already know and love.

Anyway, check out eWeek to see examples and descriptions of mobile sites that use Adobe Flash to deliver.

Conqu by AsFusion uses Adobe to repurpose a legacy site to mobile

Netflix Queue Manager by UnitedMindset brings Netflix to you