JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mobile phone applications (apps) have been leveraged in numbers to combat the spread of COVID-19. However, little is known about these technologies’ characteristics, technical features, and various applications in healthcare when responding to this public health crises. The lack of understanding has led developers and governments to make poor choices about apps’ design, which resulted in creating less useful apps that are overall less appealing to consumers due to their technical flaws.

Objective:

This review aims to identify, analyse, and categorise health apps related to COVID-19 that are currently available for consumers in app stores; in particular, it focuses on exploring their key technical features and classifying the purposes that these apps were designed to serve.

Methods:

A review on apps was conducted using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) extension for a scoping review. The app stores “Apple Store” and “Google Play” were searched between the period of 20 April and 11 September 2020. An app was included if it was dedicated for this disease and that was listed under the health and medical related categories in these app stores. The descriptions of these apps were extracted from the apps’ webpages and thematically analysed via open coding to identify both their key technical features as well as the overall purpose of using these apps. Lastly, the characteristics of the included apps were summarised and presented with descriptive statistics.

Results:

Of 298 health apps were initially retrieved, 115 met the inclusion criteria. A total of 29 technical features were commonly found in our sample of apps which then their categorisation led to form five key purposes of apps related to COVID-19. About (67%, 77/115) of these apps were developed by governments or national authorities, and with the purpose of promoting users’ tracking personal health (31%, 9/29). Other purposes were: raising awareness on how to combat COVID-19 (27%, 8/29); managing exposure to COVID19 (20%, 6/29); monitoring health by healthcare professionals (17%, 5/29) and conducting research studies (3.5%, 1/29).

Conclusions:

This study provides an overview and taxonomy of the health apps currently available in the market to combat COVID-19 based on their differences of basic technical features and purpose of use. As the majority of apps are provided by governments or national authorities, it indicates the essential role of these apps as powerful “weapons” in public health crisis management. By involving the majority of the population to self-track their personal health and providing them with the technology to self-assess, the role of these apps is deemed to be a key driver for a participatory approach to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Further effort is required from researchers to evaluate these apps’ effectiveness, and from governmental organisations to increase public awareness of these digital solutions.