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)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Passive Sensing of Health Outcomes Through Smartphones: Systematic Review of Current Solutions and Possible Limitations
Background:
Technological advancements, together with the decrease in both price and size of a large variety of sensors, has expanded the role and capabilities of regular mobile phones, turning them into powerful yet ubiquitous monitoring systems. At present, 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 systematic review aimed to identify recent scientific studies that explored the passive use of smartphones for generating health- and well-being–related outcomes. In addition, it explores users’ engagement and possible challenges in using such self-monitoring systems.
Methods:
A systematic review was conducted, following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, to identify recent publications that explore the use of smartphones as ubiquitous health monitoring systems. We ran reproducible search queries on PubMed, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and Scopus online databases and aimed to find answers to the following questions: (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. Of these, 118 met the predefined inclusion criteria, which considered publication dates from 2014 onward, English language, and relevance for the topic of this review. The selected papers highlight that smartphones are already being used in multiple health-related scenarios. Of those, physical activity (29.6%; 35/118) and mental health (27.9; 33/118) are 2 of the most studied applications. Accelerometers (57.7%; 67/118) and global positioning systems (GPS; 40.6%; 48/118) are 2 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 although smartphones present many advantages for the passive monitoring of users’ health and well-being, there is a lack of correlation between smartphone-generated outcomes and clinical knowledge. Moreover, user engagement and motivation are not always modeled as prerequisites, 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.