Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Jun 27, 2022)
Date Submitted: Jul 20, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Self-Care Oriented Smartphone Apps for Type 2 Diabetes: A Systematic Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is a common cause of mortality worldwide: each year, the chronic disease kills over one million people, making it the ninth leading cause of death. The growing use of smartphone applications (apps) led to focusing on mobile health, which is increasingly oriented towards self-care of T2DM. With smartphone apps, patients can improve their self-care behavior and prevent complications of the disease.
Objective:
This research aims to search, analyze, and evaluate the quality of existing smartphone apps for self-care of diabetic patients to improve disease control and health status.
Methods:
In the Google Play Store and iPadian emulator, we systematically searched for Android and iOS smartphone apps. Smartphone apps that met the inclusion criteria were analyzed and evaluated with the American Association of Diabetes Educators’ self-care tool and the user version of the Mobile App Rating Scale, which assesses the integration of self-care behavior functions, and overall quality, respectively.
Results:
Out of 798 smartphone apps, we identified 12 relevant smartphone apps that included 51 out of 88 predefined self-care behavior functions. The average score for overall quality was 3.76/5 (SD=0.31), and the smartphone apps WeCheck -Diabetes lifelog, Blood Glucose Level, Smart e-SMBG - Diabetes lifelog, and Blood Glucose contained the most self-care behavior functions.
Conclusions:
We argue that T2DM monitoring can be improved by implementing the correct quantity of self-care behavior functions and including elements related to the prevention of complications due to the T2DM.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.