Do smartphone applications in healthcare require a governance and legal framework? It depends on the application!

The fast pace of technological improvement and the rapid development and adoption of healthcare applications present crucial challenges for clinicians, users and policy makers. Some of the most pressing dilemmas include the need to ensure the safety of applications and establish their cost-effectiveness while engaging patients and users to optimize their integration into health decision-making. Healthcare organizations need to consider the risk of fragmenting clinical practice within the organization as a result of too many apps being developed or used, as well as mechanisms for app integration into the wider electronic health records through development of governance framework for their use. The impact of app use on the interactions between clinicians and patients needs to be explored, together with the skills required for both groups to benefit from the use of apps. Although healthcare and academic institutions should support the improvements offered by technological advances, they must strive to do so within robust governance frameworks, after sound evaluation of clinical outcomes and examination of potential unintended consequences

Self-Guiding Behavior Change using a Mobile App

Based on the expanding usage of smartphones as the platform for computer applications, this paper addresses the information asymmetry between personal and factual observations that inform a decision-making process. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model to help self-guided behavioral change based on collection of personal information. A mobile application exemplifies self-guiding behavioral change through the collection of daily quantitative data and the retrieval of descriptive statistics during decision-making

Análisis de la calidad y seguridad de la información de aplicaciones móviles en prevención terciaria

Objetivo: Analizar la calidad y seguridad de la información de las aplicaciones móviles en la App Store de Apple® destinadas a prevención terciaria.Material y métodos: Estudio observacional transversal de las aplicaciones móviles más populares en la categoría de medicina disponibles en Apple Store® a día de 21 de diciembre de 2014. Las aplicaciones fueron evaluadas con los criterios establecidos en el programa AppSaludable. Se seleccionaron aquellos criterios relacionados con la evaluación de la calidad y seguridad de la información.Resultados: De las 160 aplicaciones recogidas, sólo 12 aplicaciones estaban incluidas en la prevención terciaria. Todas las aplicaciones recuperadas estaban relacionadas con la adherencia, diabetes, hipertensión y alergia. Las aplicaciones desarrolladas por equipos multidisciplinares fueron las que presentaron mayor rigor en su información,Conclusiones: La presencia de un profesional sanitario como colaborador de la aplicación parece mejorar la calidad de la información

Medical Education, PDAS and Smartphones: Welcome to the 21st Century

PDAs and Smartphones allow medical professionals to access medical information more easily than ever before. This literature review examines use of these devices and associated “apps” in medical education, finding widespread use by medical students, residents, and faculty. Surprisingly, little generational bias was noted

Heart rate monitoring, activity recognition, and recommendation for e-coaching

Equipped with hardware, such as accelerometer and heart rate sensor, wearables enable measuring physical activities and heart rate. However, the accuracy of these heart rate measurements is still unclear and the coupling with activity recognition is often missing in health apps. This study evaluates heart rate monitoring with four different device types: a specialized sports device with chest strap, a fitness tracker, a smart watch, and a smartphone using photoplethysmography. In a state of rest, similar measurement results are obtained with the four devices. During physical activities, the fitness tracker, smart watch, and smartphone measure sudden variations in heart rate with a delay, due to movements of the wrist. Moreover, this study showed that physical activities, such as squats and dumbbell curl, can be recognized with fitness trackers. By combining heart rate monitoring and activity recognition, personal suggestions for physical activities are generated using a tag-based recommender and rule-based filter

Evaluating a South African mobile application for healthcare professionals to improve diagnosis and notification of pesticide poisonings

Acute pesticide poisoning (APP) is a major global public health problem, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) including South Africa. However, healthcare professionals (HCPs) worldwide have limited training in handling environmental health risks such as from pesticide exposures. Most HCPs lack basic training on APP and, this presents a challenge to HCPs when diagnosing and notifying pesticide-related poisonings. With a recent increase in mobile application technology, this gives a convenient platform to provide training support for HCPs in their clinical practice. An example is the integration of a South African pesticide notification guideline into an existing Emergency Medicine (EM) mobile application. This pesticide notification guideline (PNG) within the EM mobile application aims to provide an immediate point-of-care tool to help HCPs in diagnosis and notify pesticide poisoning cases. Despite this useful platform for training HCPs, there are limited studies that have evaluated mobile applications or technologies to promote HCPs training in LMICs. This study, therefore, aimed to evaluate the Centre for Environmental and Occupational Health Research (CEOHR)'s PGN adapted for the EM mobile application as a tool for improving HCP's ability to diagnose and report APPs. The protocol (Part A) provides information and a justification for the research study and, describes the methods used to gather and analyse the data. The extended literature review (Part B) provides an overview of studies assessing HCPs' knowledge of and training in pesticide poisonings and the role mobile health technologies play in improving HCPs' knowledge and training in clinical practice. Furthermore, the literature review illustrates the relevant theoretical frameworks and concepts that helps to understand HCPs' behaviour changes when using clinical guidelines or algorithms. The journal manuscript article (Part C) provides this study's research findings and how it could contribute to the body of knowledge. A total of 50 emergency medicine physicians and registrars participated in th

THE PROCESS AND DEVELOPMENT OF A UNIVERSITY HEALTHCARE MOBILE APPLICATION.

In this project, I’ve researched the impact of M-Health among smartphone use in today’s society. Smartphone habits have been researched as well as what type of health care information college aged students are seeking out. This research, including a survey of uses and perceptions of mobile apps and interests in healthcare topics, will help with the creation of a university health center mobile app. This app will fulfill the needs of the students and the university while creating a healthier campus environment