Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Oct 30, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 3, 2018 - Dec 29, 2018
Date Accepted: May 28, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Passive sensing of health outcomes through smartphones: a systematic review of current solutions and possible limitations
ABSTRACT
Background:
Technological advancements together with the decrease in both price and size of a large variety of sensors expanded the role and capabilities of regular mobile phones, turning them into powerful, yet ubiquitous monitoring systems. Nowadays smartphones have the potential to continuously collect information about the users, monitor their activities and behaviors in real-time and provide them with feedback and recommendations.
Objective:
This paper focuses on identifying recent scientific studies that explore the passive use of smartphones for generating health and well-being related outcomes. Additionally, it explores users' engagement and possible challenges in using such self-monitoring systems.
Methods:
We conducted a systematic review, following PRISMA guidelines, to identify recent publications that explore the use of the smartphones as ubiquitous health monitoring systems. We ran reproducible search queries on Pubmed, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital libraries and Scopus online databases. The main aspects to cover were the following: (1) What is the study focus of the selected papers? (2) What smartphone sensing technologies and data are used to gather health related input? (3) How are the developed systems validated? and (4) What are the limitations and challenges when using such sensing systems?
Results:
Our bibliographic research returned 7404 unique publications. 118 met the predefined inclusion criteria, which takes into consideration publication dates from 2014 onwards, English language and relevance for the topic of this review. The selected papers highlight that the use of smartphone is already being used in multiple health related scenarios. Out of those, physical activity (29%) and mental health (27%) are two of the most studied applications. The accelerometer (57%) and GPS (41%) are two of the most used sensors in smartphones for collecting data from which the health status or well-being of its users can be inferred.
Conclusions:
One relevant outcome of this systematic review is that while smartphones present many advantages for the passive monitoring of the users' health and well-being, there is a lack of correlation between smartphone generated outcomes and clinical knowledge. Moreover, user engagement and motivation is not always modelled a prerequisite, which directly affects user adherence and full validation of such systems.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
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.