Selecting and Evaluating Mobile Health Apps for the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative: Development of the eHealth Resource Checklist

BACKGROUND: The ubiquity of smartphones and mobile devices in the general population presents an unprecedented opportunity for preventative health. Not surprisingly, the use of electronic health (eHealth) resources accessed through mobile devices in clinical trials is becoming more prevalent; the selection, screening, and collation of quality eHealth resources is necessary to clinical trials using these technologies. However, the constant creation and turnover of new eHealth resources can make this task difficult. Although syntheses of eHealth resources are becoming more common, their methodological and reporting quality require improvement so as to be more accessible to nonexperts. Further, there continues to be significant variation in quality criteria employed for assessment, with no clear method for developing the included criteria. There is currently no single existing framework that addresses all six dimensions of mobile health app quality identified in Agarwal et al’s recent scoping review (ie, basic descriptions of the design and usage of the resource; technical features and accessibility; health information quality; usability; evidence of impact; and user engagement and behavior change). In instances where highly systematic tactics are not possible (due to time constraints, cost, or lack of expertise), there may be value in adopting practical and pragmatic approaches to helping researchers and clinicians identify and disseminate e-resources. OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to create a set of guidelines (ie, a checklist) to aid the members of the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI) Canada trial—a preconception randomized controlled clinical trial to prevent child obesity—to assist their efforts in searching, identifying, screening, and including selected eHealth resources for participant use in the study intervention. METHODS: A framework for searching, screening, and selecting eHealth resources was adapted from the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) checklist for systematic and scoping reviews to optimize the rigor, clarity, and transparency of the process. Details regarding searching, selecting, extracting, and assessing quality of eHealth resources are described. RESULTS: This study resulted in the systematic development of a checklist consisting of 12 guiding principles, organized in a chronological versus priority sequence to aid researchers in searching, screening, and assessing the quality of various eHealth resources. CONCLUSIONS: The eHealth Resource Checklist will assist researchers in navigating the eHealth resource space by providing a mechanism to detail their process of developing inclusion criteria, identifying search location, selecting and reviewing evidence, extracting information, evaluating the quality of the evidence, and synthesizing the extracted evidence. The overarching goal of this checklist is to provide researchers or generalists new to the eHealth field with a tool that balances pragmatism with rigor and that helps standardize the process of searching and critiquing digital material—a particularly important aspect given the recent explosion of and reliance on eHealth resources. Moreover, this checklist may be useful to other researchers and practitioners developing similar health interventions.