BACKGROUND Mobile health (mHealth) has undergone exponential growth in recent years. Patients and healthcare professionals are increasingly using health-related applications, at the same time as concerns about ethical issues, bias, conflicts of interest and privacy are emerging. The general aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the current state of development of mHealth. METHODS AND...

Application stores (app stores) enable developers to interact with users by responding their reviews. Many continuously monitor user reviews and seek respond them effectively efficiently boost satisfaction, which in the end increases app’s rating. Thus, it is essential study developer responses how improve them. This research was aimed at evaluating both Apple App Store Google Play banking doma...

BACKGROUND Oral contraceptives (OCs) are the most widely used contraceptive method among women of reproductive age in the United States (US). Routine download and use of health-related smartphone applications (apps) continues to increase. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to evaluate the utility of English-language, smartphone-platform OC reminder apps currently available for download i...

Mobile technology and applications (apps) have disrupted several industries including healthcare. The advantage of apps, being personally focused and permitting bidirectional communication, make them well suited to address many immunization challenges. As of April 25, 2015 searching the Android app store with the words 'immunize app' and 'immunization app' in Canada yielded 225 apps. On the App...

BACKGROUND For many mental health conditions, mobile health apps offer the ability to deliver information, support, and intervention outside the clinical setting. However, there are difficulties with the use of a commercial app store to distribute health care resources, including turnover of apps, irrelevance of apps, and discordance with evidence-based practice. OBJECTIVE The primary aim of ...

Smartphones and “app stores” are enabling the distribution of a wide variety of third party applications to very large numbers of people around the globe in an instance with the potential to collect rich, large-scale data sets. This new era represents a game changer for our research community one which we are still trying to best understand and exploit. We discuss our experiences in developing,...

BACKGROUND Mobile technology is pervasive and widely used to obtain information about drugs such as cannabis, especially in a climate of rapidly changing cannabis policy; yet the content of available cannabis apps is largely unknown. Understanding the resources available to those searching for cannabis apps will clarify how this technology is being used to reflect and influence cannabis use beh...

With the introduction of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems, the sales of smartphones have exploded. These smartphones have become powerful devices that are basically miniature versions of personal computers. However, the growing popularity and sophistication of smartphones have also increased concerns about the privacy of users who operate these devices. These concerns have bee...

App developers would like to know the characteristics of app releases that achieve high impact. To address this, we mined the most consistently popular Google Play and Windows Phone apps, once per week, over a period of 12 months. In total we collected 3,187 releases, from which we identified 1,547 for which there was adequate prior and posterior time series data to facilitate causal impact ass...