Below is the citation, abstract and a selected extract from a new paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. The full text is freely available here:

http://mhealth.jmir.org/2015/1/e28/

We read that there are more than 100,000 apps now available, but it is unclear which of these, if any, are actually useful in terms of helping to protect the health of citizens in low-resource settings. Research in 2013/14 by the mHIFA Working Group found that ‘of the 1,700 mHealth programs/projects scanned, there are very few [<1%] projects that actually empower citizens in low-income countries with information on their phones for them to consult as and when they need it, in acute healthcare situations’. http://www.hifa2015.org/the-first-hifa-smart-goal-mobile-healthcare-information-for-all/

CITATION: Xu W, Liu Y. mHealthApps: A Repository and Database of Mobile Health Apps

JMIR mHealth uHealth 2015;3(1):e28  Published on 18.03.15 in Vol 3, No 1 (2015): Jan-Mar

DOI: 10.2196/mhealth.4026

ABSTRACT

Background: The market of mobile health (mHealth) apps has rapidly evolved in the past decade. With more than 100,000 mHealth apps currently available, there is no centralized resource that collects information on these health-related apps for researchers in this field to effectively evaluate the strength and weakness of these apps.

Objective: The objective of this study was to create a centralized mHealth app repository. We expect the analysis of information in this repository to provide insights for future mHealth research developments.

Methods: We focused on apps from the two most established app stores, the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. We extracted detailed information of each health-related app from these two app stores via our python crawling program, and then stored the information in both a user-friendly array format and a standard JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

Results: We have developed a centralized resource that provides detailed information of more than 60,000 health-related apps from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Using this information resource, we analyzed thousands of apps systematically and provide an overview of the trends for mHealth apps.

Conclusions: This unique database allows the meta-analysis of health-related apps and provides guidance for research designs of future apps in the mHealth field.

JMIR mHealth uHealth 2015;3(1):e28)

EXTRACT (selected by Neil PW)

‘Limitations… our repository is limited in the regions the information was extracted from. For the AppStore, we only extracted apps information from the top 5 regions according to the market size, which neglects information from other well developed countries such as Australia and European countries (different stores are separated by different languages), as well as from fast developing regions such as Africa and India.’

Best wishes, Neil

Let’s build a future where people are no longer dying for lack of healthcare knowledge – Join HIFA: www.hifa2015.org