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. 2012 Aug 9;14(4):e112. doi: 10.2196/jmir.2152

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©Connie Chen, David Haddad, Joshua Selsky, Julia E Hoffman, Richard L Kravitz, Deborah E Estrin, Ida Sim. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 09.08.2012.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

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Stovepipe versus open architectures: mHealth apps (left) are built independently with little sharing of data, methods, or learning. In contrast, the Internet has an hourglass architecture (right), in which a common protocol, transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP), acts as a simple point of commonality at the narrow waist that allows innovation to flourish through open application programming interfaces (APIs) both above and below the waist. Open mHealth aims to catalyze the mHealth ecosystem from a siloed architecture to an hourglass architecture to increase the scale and effectiveness of mHealth.