Mobile Health Apps Popular, but Efficacy in Question, Experts Say

EVENTS

JUN

Interactive Policy Forum on Health Care, 'Big Data'

Washington, D.C.

JUN

Webinar About How Physicians Use Health IT

Online

JUN

Summit Explores Using Video Games in Health Care

Boston

View All Events

FROM THE FOUNDATION

Big Business, Little Data

A growing number of Californians are being sent to ambulatory surgery centers for a wide variety of procedures, yet little is known about the care they deliver because reporting is not required.

Keeping Track of Asthma

CHCF has made a second investment in Asthmapolis, a device that tracks asthma inhaler use and reports data through mobile phones to patients and doctors to better manage the disease.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Mobile Health Apps Popular, but Efficacy in Question, Experts Say

Despite the popularity of health care-related smart phone applications, there is not much evidence to suggest they actually work to promote healthy behavior in users, LiveScience/Fox News reports (LiveScience/Fox News, 3/21).

Prevalence, Use of Health-Related Apps

There are about 8,000 health-related apps available through iTunes alone, according to Brian Dolan of MobiHealthNews.

Yet individuals who seek out the technology do not necessarily use it frequently, according to mobile health app analyst Pamela Culver, who found that 26% of those who download health apps use them only once (De La Rocha, Yahoo! News, 3/21).

Studies Consider App Efficacy

A recent study on the efficacy of anti-smoking apps by Lorien Abroms, a researcher at George Washington University, found that none of the reviewed apps offered methods proven successful by smoking cessation programs.

In a separate study that has not yet been published, Abroms found that weight-loss apps fared better in providing known methods for losing weight (LiveScience/Fox News, 3/21).

Health-related apps could more reliably offer proven techniques in the future, as FDA recently said it will begin requiring regulatory review and software validation for the technology, according to Yahoo! News (Yahoo! News, 3/21).

Changing Behaviors

However, according to Adam Kaufman -- president of DPS Health, which contracts with insurers and physicians for patient support programs -- no studies have assessed how well health-related apps change behaviors primarily because academic research tends to lag behind innovation in technology (LiveScience/Fox News, 3/21).

Margaret Morris, a senior researcher with Intel, said that to reliably change behaviors, health apps will have to account for variations in user motivations.

At a recent panel on health apps at the South by Southwest Interactive, Morris said, "One of the landmines with developing and promoting health software is an assumption that people set health goals and follow them in a steadfast manner," adding, "But people have a lot of variation in motivation and we need to address the social and emotion[al] factors that affect motivation variation" (Yahoo! News, 3/21).

4
02/26/2012
Gordon Green

Here is an interesting article
gigaom.com/2010/10/11/mobile-health-apps-are-on-the-rise/

3
02/19/2012
Gordon Green

I have a few friends who gave some of the apps that claimed to help people not smoke but in the end it is nothing more than just fluff that my friends already knew over years of trying to quit, so users beware, take everything that the apps claim to do with a pinch of salt, a healthy one.

2
03/23/2011
Richard Adler

Robyn makes a good point. The FoxNews article states that "There haven't been any studies of the efficacy of apps," but there have been at least 5 reviews of mobile interventions to promote positive behavior change (including the Cochrane review), most of which focus on studies based on SMS text messaging. These reviews conclude that the majority of RCT studies do show statistically significant behavior change, at least in the short run. What is still lacking is evidence on success in achieving long term behavior change.

1
03/23/2011
robyn whittaker

Correct, but mobile health is not just about apps. There is evidence of the effectiveness of SMS/text messaging in behavior change (eg. Cochrane review on mobile phones for smoking cessation - and more to come). For some reason apps don't tend to use some of the techniques which are effective and ideal for mobile phones.