Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Dec 24, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 2, 2019 - Feb 27, 2019
Date Accepted: Aug 31, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Mental health apps in China: a review of features and evaluation of quality
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mental disorders have been a great burden to health system, affecting the quality of life for millions of world population. Developing countries, including China, are suffered by double burden of both increasing mental health (MH) issues in population and deficiency in MH care resources. The use of mobile health technologies, especially for smartphone applications, can be a possible solution.
Objective:
This review was conducted to describe the features and assess the quality of MH apps in major smartphone app markets in China, and further discuss the priori of MH app development.
Methods:
Keywords including “psychology”, “psychological health”, “psychological hygiene”, “psychological health service(s)”, “mental”, “mental health”, “mental hygiene”, “mental health service(s)”, “depression”, and “anxiety” were searched in Chinese in three Android app markets (“Baidu Mobile Assistant”, “Tencent MyApp”, and “360 Mobile Assistant”) and iOS AppStore independently. MH apps were then selected according to established criteria for data extraction and analysis, and quality assessment by using the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS).
Results:
In total, 63 out of 997 MH apps were analyzed in depth, of which 78% (49/63) were developed by commercial entities for general population, 17% (11/63) were for patients or clients of specialized psychiatric hospitals or counseling agencies, 3% (2/63) were by government or local Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for general information, and one for students of a university. Major built-in features of the apps included counselling services, MH education, and self-assessment of MH status by validated self-rating scales. The quality score of the MH apps were overall “acceptable”.
Conclusions:
MH apps are emerging in the area of mobile health in China. Popular MH apps usually provide a synthetic platform organizing resources of information, knowledge, counseling services, self-tests and management, for general population with MH related inquiries. The quality of the apps was rated as “acceptable” on average, suggesting some space for improvement. Official guidelines and regulations are urgently required for the field in future.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
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