JMIR mHealth and uHealth
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JMIR mHealth and uHealth · Feb 2017
Apps for People With Rheumatoid Arthritis to Monitor Their Disease Activity: A Review of Apps for Best Practice and Quality.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory arthritis requiring long-term treatment with regular monitoring by a rheumatologist to achieve good health outcomes. Since people with RA may wish to monitor their own disease activity with a smartphone app, it is important to understand the functions and quality of apps for this purpose. ⋯ This review found a lack of high-quality apps for longitudinal assessment of RA disease activity. Current apps fall into two categories: simple calculators primarily for rheumatologists and data tracking tools for people with RA. The latter do not uniformly collect data using validated instruments or composite disease activity measures. There is a need for appropriate, high-quality apps for use by rheumatologists and patients together in co-management of RA.
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JMIR mHealth and uHealth · Feb 2017
Formative Evaluation of Participant Experience With Mobile eConsent in the App-Mediated Parkinson mPower Study: A Mixed Methods Study.
To fully capitalize on the promise of mobile technology to enable scalable, participant-centered research, we must develop companion self-administered electronic informed consent (eConsent) processes. As we do so, we have an ethical obligation to ensure that core tenants of informed consent-informedness, comprehension, and voluntariness-are upheld. Furthermore, we should be wary of recapitulating the pitfalls of "traditional" informed consent processes. ⋯ Our study serves as a formative evaluation of participant experience with a self-administered informed consent process via a mobile app. Areas for future investigation include direct comparison of the efficacy of self-administered eConsent with facilitated informed consent processes, exploring the potential benefits and pitfalls of smartphone user behavioral habits on participant engagement in research, and developing best practices to increase informedness, comprehension, and voluntariness via participant coengagement in the research endeavor.
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JMIR mHealth and uHealth · Dec 2016
Mobile Phone Apps to Improve Medication Adherence: A Systematic Stepwise Process to Identify High-Quality Apps.
There are a growing number of mobile phone apps available to support people in taking their medications and to improve medication adherence. However, little is known about how these apps differ in terms of features, quality, and effectiveness. ⋯ Many medication reminder apps are available in the app stores; however, the majority of them did not have many of the desirable features and were, therefore, considered low quality. Through a systematic stepwise process, we were able to identify high-quality apps to be tested in a future study that will provide evidence on the use of medication reminder apps to improve medication adherence.
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JMIR mHealth and uHealth · Sep 2016
The Effect of Smartphone Interventions on Patients With Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Exacerbations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
The prevalence and mortality rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are increasing worldwide. Therefore, COPD remains a major public health problem. There is a growing interest in the use of smartphone technology for health promotion and disease management interventions. However, the effectiveness of smartphones in reducing the number of patients having a COPD exacerbation is poorly understood. ⋯ Although current literature on the role of smartphones in reducing COPD exacerbations is limited, findings from our review suggest that smartphones are useful in reducing the number of patients having a COPD exacerbation. Nevertheless, using smartphones require synergistic strategies to achieve the desired outcome. These results should be interpreted with caution due to the heterogeneity among the studies. Researchers should focus on conducting rigorous studies with adequately powered sample sizes to determine the validity and clinical utility of smartphone interventions in the management of COPD.
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The emergence of mobile health (mHealth) offers unique and varied opportunities to address some of the most difficult problems of health. Some of the most promising and active efforts of mHealth involve the engagement of mobile phone technology. ⋯ The core characteristics we discuss are (1) the penetration or adoption into populations, (2) the availability and form of apps, (3) the availability and form of wireless broadband access to the Internet, and (4) the tethering of the device to individuals. These collectively act to both enable and constrain the provision of population health in general, as well as personalized and precision individual health in particular.