Functional and Technical Aspects of Self-management mHealth Apps: Systematic App Search and Literature Review

BACKGROUND: Although the past decade has witnessed the development of many self-management mobile health (mHealth) apps that enable users to monitor their health and activities independently, there is a general lack of empirical evidence on the functional and technical aspects of self-management mHealth apps from a software engineering perspective. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to systematically identify the characteristics and challenges of self-management mHealth apps, focusing on functionalities, design, development, and evaluation methods, as well as to specify the differences and similarities between published research papers and commercial and open-source apps. METHODS: This research was divided into 3 main phases to achieve the expected goal. The first phase involved reviewing peer-reviewed academic research papers from 7 digital libraries, and the second phase involved reviewing and evaluating apps available on Android and iOS app stores using the Mobile Application Rating Scale. Finally, the third phase involved analyzing and evaluating open-source apps from GitHub. RESULTS: In total, 52 research papers, 42 app store apps, and 24 open-source apps were analyzed, synthesized, and reported. We found that the development of self-management mHealth apps requires significant time, effort, and cost because of their complexity and specific requirements, such as the use of machine learning algorithms, external services, and built-in technologies. In general, self-management mHealth apps are similar in their focus, user interface components, navigation and structure, services and technologies, authentication features, and architecture and patterns. However, they differ in terms of the use of machine learning, processing techniques, key functionalities, inference of machine learning knowledge, logging mechanisms, evaluation techniques, and challenges. CONCLUSIONS: Self-management mHealth apps may offer an essential means of managing users’ health, expecting to assist users in continuously monitoring their health and encourage them to adopt healthy habits. However, developing an efficient and intelligent self-management mHealth app with the ability to reduce resource consumption and processing time, as well as increase performance, is still under research and development. In addition, there is a need to find an automated process for evaluating and selecting suitable machine learning algorithms for the self-management of mHealth apps. We believe that these issues can be avoided or significantly reduced by using a model-driven engineering approach with a decision support system to accelerate and ameliorate the development process and quality of self-management mHealth apps.