Hello,
Is there any sort of guidelines or criteria that would allow us to categorize whether an app is under mhealth or not.
I have many apps that I am not sure if they could be classified as mhealth applications or not for example:
1) An app that would register you as a blood donor and give you reminders to donate blood, connect you to hospitals in need etc.
2) An App that allows you the have video call or text a doctor!
3) An App that allows you to book an appointment in a hospital.
Thank you
Hi, at least this paper:
Article From pilot to scale: Towards an mHealth typology for low-res...
makes an effort to distinguish different types of mHealth, with a focus on deployments in developing countries. The author Terje Aksel Sanner may know of more relevant literature.
m-Health, short for mobile health, is increasingly making its mark because of the benefits it offers due to wearable ans other devises. It comprises apps and data collection utilities based on smartphones/mobile phones and other wireless technology to promote care coordination, treatment support, and other communication in the healthcare industry and prevention interventions, disease surveillance, epidemic outbreak tracking and chronic disease management in public health.
the Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) defined mHealth or mobile health as medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices, such as mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other wireless devices... check this report from the WHO for more details https://www.who.int/goe/publications/goe_mhealth_web.pdf
Thank you all for your answers. I did not find any criteria but I found 2 resources that might be useful. They both provided categories for mHealth apps and gave examples under each category.
1) mHealth taxonomy: a literature survey of mobile health applications.(Olla, P., & Shimskey, C, 2015).
Article mHealth taxonomy: a literature survey of mobile health applications
Categories:
1-Point of care diagnostics , 2- Patient monitoring, 3- Wellness etc...
2) m-Health Fundamentals and Applications- Chapter 3. (Istepanian, R. S., & Woodward, B, 2016).
Book M-Health: Fundamentals and applications
Categories:
1) Health Prevention, Wellness, and“Worried Well" (one of the examples is appointment scheduling), 2)Disease Management, Assessment, and Monitoring ...etc.
They both provided categories for mHealth apps, (stepanian, R. S., & Woodward, B, 2016) categories were based on "We aim to categorize these generally in terms of some of the most popular of existing mobile health applications and services...."
I am still not convinced how an appointment app can be categorized as an mhealth app.
It highly depends on your definition of mHealth. Most of the definitions are theoretical rather than practical, that is why it is difficult to categorise/classify the health-related mobile apps according to those definitions.
It would be easier if you consider the functions of mHealth. Similar to telehealth, we can consider three major purposes for mHealth:
1) the provision of health care
2) health education
3) health administration
These functionalities can be through a smartphone software application (App), a mobile phone (call, text, multimedia) or portable digital devices.
From this perspective, I would identify a mobile app for medical appointment booking as part of mHealth (for health administration).
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