Use it or lose it? This is the question
There are thousands of mobile apps available through online app markets that claim to help people enhance their mental and physical health. They can be widely used for many purposes. You may use them to monitor your health measures (such as blood sugar levels, heart rate, and blood pressure), track behavior and activities, or use apps that suggest you a healthy daily diet. The number of these health related apps are increasing so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep a track of them. Their use are becoming more and more popular among all age groups. The problem is, despite their popularity and abundance, health mobile apps are poorly regulated and not much is known about their quality and effectiveness. As a matter of fact, there are not any standards on the quality of a health related mobile application or what is the best way to identify a good app form a bad one. Most health related apps do not meet the criteria set for medical devices, hence they are not obliged to seek any approvals from Health Canada, which is the regulatory body for drugs and health products in Canada.
Users may easily get confused by the abundance and diversity of health related apps available on the market. Some may ask their family physician or other healthcare professionals to help them choose the right app for their need. Since there are no guidelines for health care providers to rate the quality of mobile apps, they are not able to provide an evidence based recommendation.
In recent years, as a response to the demand for identifying reliable health mobile apps, several websites have started to publish ratings on popular health related apps. Most of them use ratings based on evaluations made by family physicians or other health care professionals. Examples are Practicalapps.ca , or the Addiction and Mental Health Mobile Application Directory 2016. This is a very good start to enable users make an informed decision when it comes to choosing a health related app. However, it is not clear that how these ratings have been provided. Most of these website do not publish the criteria used for their ratings or the process that they have used in order to rate the quality of these apps. Further, with the fast and ever growing number of apps on the market, it is very difficult for the administrators of the websites to keep the information up-to-date.
Our research team at University of Alberta has proposed a different solution. Instead of ratings each and every app available and publishing the results on an online directory, we propose a quality rating scale that enables health care providers evaluate the quality of any health related app themselves. This way, instead of “giving a man a fish and feeding him for the day”, we will “teach him fishing and give him a lifetime career”. Currently our focus is on mental health apps and our population of interest is senior citizens. However, we are planning to expand this project to other health related apps and include other age groups in future. The proposed rating scale can serve as a guiding reference for clinicians to identify apps that are useful and usable for their clients. Further, the scale can be used as a guiding framework for app developers to design better apps that are more usable by different users.
To do this, we will engage stakeholders such as senior citizens, app developers, and clinicians in the process of design and development of the proposed rating scale. The study protocol has been approved by the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board and we are ready to start recruiting participants for the study. If you are interested to learn more about this study feel free to contact me at azadkhan@ualberta.ca. Perhaps you can sit at one of the stakeholder committees and provide us input on items that you believe should be on a scale to rate the quality of health related apps.
Source: Peyman Azad Research Blog – RSS