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Google announced yesterday that its layered 3D browser of the human body has become an open-source project. Google Body was built by Google engineers in their "20% time" - the 1/5th of Googlers' time and energy they can devote to creative projects - of which all other human beings are jealous.

Zygote Media Group, which provided the imagery for Google's modeling, has built Zygote Body with the code. It offers the same navigation and features. To support this launch, the Google Body team has built a new, open-source 3D viewer at open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com. Thanks to the work of Google engineers, any developer can now use the same kind of 3D model browser for her or his own project.

In a sign that healthcare is moving to the mobile, a company called HealthTap is launching an app that offers a Quora-like experience from the cloud.

HealthTap Express allows the 89% of patients who turn to search engines instead of their local doctors for health information to do so in an objective and relatively "clinical" environment on mobile devices.

Mobile phones could be used to track peoples' physical activity and other health factors, using data gathered from existing community groups to track performance against baseline standards for health, rewarding individuals and groups exhibiting healthy patterns, and changing our relationship with food, exercise, medicine, insurance and general health. That's the bold vision of the future articulated by Dr. Brigitte Piniewski, Portland, Oregon-based Chief Medical Officer of PeaceHealth Laboratories, in a must-read interview on Mobile Health News this weekend.

Piniewski says young people in the United States are experiencing widespread hopelessness about their employment and insurance prospects for the long term. In part as a result, they are developing habits today that will aim them in very bad directions for their long term well-being. A data-driven realignment of our relationship with health, to move us away from crisis-prompted medical reaction and towards a culture of prevention and self-care, could not only help remake our society here in the United States. It could also help provide models that the developing world, where mobile device penetration is high but processed food consumption is low, could use to leapfrog our own experiences with self-destructive individual and collective behavior.

The explosion in the number of health-related apps has opened many interesting possibilities for rethinking both mobile and personal medicine. But when the Food and Drug Administration starts a blog post by invoking the Apple slogan "there's an app for that," you know the results may well be "there's a regulation for that."

Indeed, the FDA is proposing a set of guidelines, outlining the types of apps that it plans to oversee. This won't be all apps in the "Health" category, but will include those that, in the FDA's words, "could present a risk to patients if the apps don't work as intended."

Today Microsoft announced that users of Google Health, scheduled to be shut down on Jan. 1, 2012, can send their data to Microsoft's competing HealthVault service. In the closing paragraph, Microsoft also pitches developers to migrate their Google Health projects to HealthVault.

Just as popular consumer Web apps eventually find their way into the enterprise (Yammer anyone?), the health sector is increasingly taking its cue from the world of Web apps. The Seattle product design firm Artefact, whose future camera concept caught the attention of our readers in April, recently designed a prototype patient care app for the Seattle Children's Patient Information System.

I visited the Artefact office in Seattle last month and was shown the prototype at work on an iPad. The app, as yet unnamed, is designed to help doctors, administrators and patients manage patient care in a hospital. The colorful and eminently usable design is - I can only hope - a pointer to the hospital and doctor apps of the near future.

There have probably been times when just a cursory glance at your Facebook feed or Twitter stream reminds you that it's flu season and plenty of your friends' status updates referred to some sort of sneezy, snuffly, achy, barfy condition. Thanks to mobile technology, that's something you can still do while sick in bed: post to your various social networks.

For the healthy among us, these sorts of status updates serve as a good reminder of who we should steer clear of. But at a larger scale, this social data can give other warnings about where diseases clusters are occurring. And unlike the sorts of statistics released by the Center for Disease Control, this social data can be tracked in real-time.

That's the aim of a new startup called Sickweather. The company, which is still in private beta, wants to track the signs of sickness via social networks and generate maps so that people can determine who and where to avoid.

Mobile applications are not all just about games and news. There are tangible real world benefits that can be derived from apps. There are apps for banking and budgets, calendars and scheduling and keeping yourself healthy.

WebMD, one of the leading Internet health sites, has released a mobile application for Android. The app has been available on the iPhone since Oct., 2008 and the iPad since March, 2010 so it is about time that an Android version has finally come to the table. The app has a variety of features to keep users informed (and their health data safe) wherever they may be.

GAIN Fitness, a web based personal fitness service built by a team that includes two former Googlers, has launched in early Alpha mode to the public today. The service aims to help users make the most of the limited time to exercise, by recommending personalized workouts built from a list of 400 exercises and based on a user's goals and available time.

The GAIN team includes Nick Gammell, who spent two years doing financial modeling for YouTube and Google, and Robert Bailey, who was the lead visual designer for Google-acquired Picassa. It's rounded out by a Fullbright scholar who can do a one-armed pull-up and a software engineer with a demonstrated ability to lose weight quickly.

RunKeeper, an app described with terms like mobile, social, fitness and quantified self, has raised $1.1 million from forward-looking investors O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), the organizations announced this morning.

RunKeeper lets users track their exercise experiences over time and share their performance metrics with friends. The service is a strong example of trends that O'Reilly AlphaTech is investing in and that the tech world in general is looking forward to: the tracking, quantification, benchmarking and socialization of previously off-line activities. Usually called "the Internet of Things," in some cases this paradigm extends to human activity as well.