Travelling With Everyday Medical Conditions can Become Life Threatening When They Can't be Communicated

LONDON, June 30, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- SOS 4 Life, a company which provides medical mobile applications, announces the launch of its 'Health Records' iPhone App dedicated to providing peace of mind during a medical crisis whilst in a foreign country. The application stores your most important medical information including allergies, medical conditions and medication in a health record on your mobile phone and provides an immediate translation of the health record into Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch - without the need of an internet connection.

Even travellers who have such common conditions like Diabetes, High Blood Pressure or allergies can easily be misdiagnosed and not receive the right treatment for their condition when language barriers prevent doctors and nurses from fully understanding the patient's problem. If the traveller's conditions are more complex than that, the application can also cope, as it currently has over 700 conditions pre-populated in its extensive multi-lingual data base with more being added all the time. Users of the App are encouraged to provide feedback and add conditions to the ever-growing list.

The product has been created in collaboration with more than 20 medical practitioners across Europe and was the brainchild of Dr Heike Unverhau, a German born surgeon and A&E physician turned business consultant, who now lives in the UK. Dr. Unverhau comments "SOS 4 Life has been created to help people who travel, live or work abroad to take better care of their health. We wanted to develop a convenient, helpful and reliable application that would help people to live life to the full whilst minimising some of the risks associated with international travel. Travelling increases our risk of attracting disease by up to five times [G. Hasle, Oslo Travel Clinic, 2009, at ISTN conference], and few people are prepared for this situation. They often don't realize that doctors need to know their medical history to help effectively, especially when they have pre-existing conditions, take medication or have allergies. They might be able to exchange a few words with their doctor, but when it comes to medical facts this is rarely enough."

The SOS 4 Life application is available for download from the iTunes AppStore for currently just $ 3.99 one-off in a holiday promotion.

    Contact:
    Dr med Heike Unverhau
    Travel Health Solutions LLP
    +44(0)78-2512-1437
    [email protected]
    http://www.sos4life.org

SOURCE SOS 4 Life