Analysis of mHealth research: mapping the relationship between mobile apps technology and healthcare during COVID-19 outbreak

BACKGROUND: Mobile health applications (mHealth apps) offer enormous promise for illness monitoring and treatment to improve the provided medical care and promote health and wellbeing. OBJECTIVE: We applied bibliometric quantitative analysis and network visualization to highlight research trends and areas of particular interest. We expect by summarizing the trends in mHealth app research, our work will serve as a roadmap for future investigations. METHODS: Relevant English publications were extracted from the Scopus database. VOSviewer (version 1.6.17) was used to build coauthorship networks of authors, countries, and the co-occurrence networks of author keywords. RESULTS: We analyzed 550 published articles on mHealth apps from 2020 to February 1, 2021. The yearly publications increased from 130 to 390 in 2021. JMIR mHealth and uHealth (33/550, 6.0%), J. Med. Internet Res. (27/550, 4.9%), JMIR Res. Protoc. (22/550, 4.0%) were the widest journals for these publications. The United States has the largest number of publications (143/550, 26.0%), and England ranks second (96/550, 17.5%). The top three productive authors were: Giansanti D., Samuel G., Lucivero F., and Zhang L. Frequent authors’ keywords have formed major 4 clusters representing the hot topics in the field: (1) artificial intelligence and telehealthcare; (2) digital contact tracing apps, privacy and security concerns; (3) mHealth apps and mental health; (4) mHealth apps in public health and health promotion. CONCLUSIONS: mHealth apps undergo current developments, and they remain hot topics in COVID-19. These findings might be useful in determining future perspectives to improve infectious disease control and present innovative solutions for healthcare.