A Systematic Review of Healthcare Applications for Smartphones

By A. Mosa, Illhoi Yoo, Lincoln R. Sheets. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 2012

1,189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundAdvanced mobile communications and portable computation are now combined in handheld devices called “smartphones”, which are also capable of running third-party software. The number of smartphone users is growing rapidly, including among healthcare professionals. The purpose of this study was to classify smartphone-based healthcare technologies as discussed in academic literature according to their functionalities, and summarize articles in each category.MethodsIn April 2011, MEDLINE was searched to identify articles that discussed the design, development, evaluation, or use of smartphone-based software for healthcare professionals, medical or nursing students, or patients. A total of 55 articles discussing 83 applications were selected for this study from 2,894 articles initially obtained from the MEDLINE searches.ResultsA total of 83 applications were documented: 57 applications for healthcare professionals focusing on disease diagnosis (21), drug reference (6), medical calculators (8), literature search (6), clinical communication (3), Hospital Information System (HIS) client applications (4), medical training (2) and general healthcare applications (7); 11 applications for medical or nursing students focusing on medical education; and 15 applications for patients focusing on disease management with chronic illness (6), ENT-related (4), fall-related (3), and two other conditions (2). The disease diagnosis, drug reference, and medical calculator applications were reported as most useful by healthcare professionals and medical or nursing students.ConclusionsMany medical applications for smartphones have been developed and widely used by health professionals and patients. The use of smartphones is getting more attention in healthcare day by day. Medical applications make smartphones useful tools in the practice of evidence-based medicine at the point of care, in addition to their use in mobile clinical communication. Also, smartphones can play a very important role in patient education, disease self-management, and remote monitoring of patients.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, General Health Professions, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00e9516e804cffd7f0cb3f4707c6c462d514bb99

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Mark R. Cutkosky
2. Scott L. Delp
3. Ajay Seth

Citations in the corpus

• Smartphone Ownership and Interest in Mobile Applications to Monitor Symptoms of Mental Health Conditions (2014, neutral): “The feasibility and validity of electronic ESM using tools such as Palm computers has been studied in mood disorders research [13] and schizophrenia research [14].”
• Quantified self and human movement: a review on the clinical impact of wearable sensing and feedback for gait analysis and intervention. (2014, background): “have produced sensors that are smaller, lighter, and more robust than previous versions and are often combined with portable computation devices, such as smartphones, for a variety of applications [5].”
• Who Uses Mobile Phone Health Apps and Does Use Matter? A Secondary Data Analytics Approach (2017, neutral): “There is increasing usage of health apps among health care professionals, patients and general public [8], and apps can play a role in patient education, disease self-management, remote monitoring of patients, and collection of dietary data [9-12].”
• The Internet of Things for Health Care: A Comprehensive Survey (2015, background): “An extensive review of healthcare apps for smartphones is systematically provided in [95], including a discussion on apps for patients and general healthcare apps as well as on medical education, training, information search apps, and others (collectively referred to as auxiliary apps).”
• Smartphones and Health Promotion: A Review of the Evidence (2013, background): “A review of Mosa et al. reported other three human fall detection smartphones ’ applications available on the market [32].”