What does “Mobius” mean?

Last week I was telling a friend about Mobius Health when she interrupted me – “Ah, that makes sense!” She works as an engineer and made the connection quickly, explaining how a Möbius strip can be created by taking a long piece of paper, giving it a half-twist, and then joining the ends together to form a loop with a single side. If you aren’t familiar with the concept it can take a moment to wrap your head around. Let’s take a look at what “Mobius” means and why the name makes sense for Mobius Health.

The simplest explanation is that the Möbius strip is a continuous shape, and our goal at Mobius Health is continuous care. By developing integrated platforms at the forefront of remote medical technology, we provide tools that allow medical care to continue no matter where you are. Mobius Health started from this concept, and since then we’ve developed a set of interconnected tools to help both doctors and patients.

Understanding the Möbius strip itself is a little more complicated. The concept was discovered by German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius in 1858, who explained that the strip is a surface with only one side and one boundary component. It is homeomorphic to a circle and chiral (or non-symmetrical). You can find algebraic equations with solutions that have the topology of a Möbius strip.

But if you’re like me (and you didn’t study geometry or topology in college), you probably just started skimming this blog post. The cool part about mobius is that it’s an unlikely single-sided and continuous shape. It has practical applications and real world manifestations in manufacturing, physics, chemistry, and even music theory. In fact, you probably see a Möbius strip every day – the most common iteration is the universal recycling symbol. If you chase the recycling arrows with attention to which side you’re on, you will realize you’re on a single surface that goes on forever.

I like to think about the Möbius strip as a giant roller coaster, where you loop around doing half barrell rolls, using the top and bottom of the track, which is all really one side. There are actually at least 5 Mobius loop roller coasters in the world, but instead of ending up on the bottom of where you started, they are designed with two parallel tracks that are both upright. If you start on the left you will finish on the right, and another loop around will put back on the left where you started.

If the roller coaster image is dizzying, you can always come back to the obvious connection we started with: continuous shape, continuous care. Our mantra at Mobius is “Simple,” and our Mobius Mobile and Mobius Clinic apps reflect that. Using an intuitive interface on the smartphone you already own, Mobius Health extends your doctor’s office for continuous care, streamlines your clinic’s workflow, and syncs everything directly to your EMR. It’s as elegant as the Möbius strip in our logo.