Explore our sister journals here.

Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

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)

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Mental Health Apps in China: Analysis and Quality Assessment

Shang J, Wei S, Jin J, Zhang P

Mental Health Apps in China: Analysis and Quality Assessment

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2019;7(11):e13236

DOI: 10.2196/13236

PMID: 31697245

PMCID: 6873144

Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.

Mental Health Apps in China: Analysis and Quality Assessment

  • Jie Shang; 
  • Shaoming Wei; 
  • Jianbo Jin; 
  • Puhong Zhang

Background:

Mental disorders have been a great burden on health care systems, affecting the quality of life of millions of people worldwide. Developing countries, including China, suffer from the double burden of both the increasing mental health issues in population and the deficiency in mental health care resources. The use of mobile health technologies, especially for mobile phone apps, can be a possible solution.

Objective:

This review aimed to describe the features and assess the quality of mental health apps in major mobile phone app markets in China and further discuss the priorities for mental health 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 3 Android app markets (Baidu Mobile Assistant, Tencent MyApp, and 360 Mobile Assistant) and iOS App Store independently. Mental health apps were then selected according to established criteria for in-depth analysis and quality assessment by the Mobile App Rating Scale.

Results:

In total, 63 of 997 mental health 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 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for general information, and 2% (1/63) for students of a university. Major built-in features of the apps included counseling services, mental health education, and self-assessment of mental health status by validated self-rating scales. The overall quality score of the MH apps was acceptable.

Conclusions:

Mental health apps are emerging in the area of mobile health in China. Popular mental health apps usually provide a synthetic platform organizing resources of information, knowledge, counseling services, self-tests, and management for the general population with mental health-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 the future.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Shang J, Wei S, Jin J, Zhang P

Mental Health Apps in China: Analysis and Quality Assessment

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2019;7(11):e13236

DOI: 10.2196/13236

PMID: 31697245

PMCID: 6873144

Per the author's request the PDF is not available.

© 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.