Abstract
During the last years, the usage of smartphones has rapidly infiltrated a plethora of daily functions. The health related applications which can carry out both simple functions such as recording vital signs or more complicated such as operating as computer-aided diagnosis systems, are amongst the most popular. In 2015 more than 100.000 mobile health applications (mHealth apps) have been found in the “Medical” and “Health and fitness” categories. It is estimated that in 2016 mHealth apps will be used by more than 500 million users worldwide, in which consumers, patients and healthcare professionals are included. This rapid development of mHealth apps revealed the need for their evaluation, assessment and regulatory compliance. This need is imposed by their particular nature, since lack of quality and specificity, or misuse of the information provided, may compromise user’s health status, as well as security and privacy of the personal health data issues which are also of primary importance. In this work, it is presented how mHealth apps may in some example cases replace medical devices. Also, this work highlights the parameters the mHealth apps evaluation should rely on along with the existing app governance models for the healthcare domain. Moreover, we propose some of the main designing strategies and practices which can be followed by mobile app designers in order to enhance the usability of the mHealth apps.
The original version of this chapter was inadvertently published with an incorrect chapter pagination 973–976 and DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_190. The page range and the DOI has been re-assigned. The correct page range is 979–982 and the DOI is 10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_191. The erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_260
An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_260
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Marinou, M., Pallikarakis, N. (2016). Mobile Health Applications: Design, Regulation and Assessment. In: Kyriacou, E., Christofides, S., Pattichis, C. (eds) XIV Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing 2016. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 57. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_191
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32703-7_191
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