Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 12, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 11, 2022 - Mar 8, 2022
Date Accepted: May 3, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: May 24, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Monitoring Symptoms of COVID-19: A Review of Mobile Applications
ABSTRACT
Background:
Monitoring acute and long-term symptoms of COVID-19 is critical for personal and public health. Mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps) can be used to support symptom monitoring at the point of need for patients with COVID-19.
Objective:
To systematically review and evaluate mHealth apps for quality, functionality, and consistency with guidelines for monitoring symptoms of COVID-19.
Methods:
We conducted a systematic review of apps for COVID-19 symptom monitoring by searching in two major app stores. The final apps were independently assessed using the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS), IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics functionality score, and guidelines from the Center for Disease Control and World Health Organization. Interrater reliability between the reviewers was calculated.
Results:
A total of 1,017 mobile apps were reviewed and 20 met the inclusion criteria. The majority of the apps (90%, n=18) were designed to track acute COVID-19 symptoms, and only two addressed long-term symptoms. Overall, the apps scored high on quality, with an overall MARS rating of 3.94. The most common functionality among all apps was the instruct function (95%, n=19). The most common symptoms included in the apps for tracking were: fever and dry cough (n=18), aches and pains (n=17), difficulty breathing (n=17), tiredness, sore throat, headache, loss of taste, or smell (n=16), and diarrhea (n=15).
Conclusions:
mHealth apps designed to monitor symptoms of COVID-19 had high quality, but the majority of apps focused almost exclusively on acute symptoms. Future apps should also incorporate monitoring long-term symptoms of COVID-19. Clinical Trial: N/A
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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.