Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Sep 30, 2019
Date Accepted: Aug 18, 2020
Just a ‘One Hit Wonder’ or Sustainable Potential for Improvement? The Potential Benefits and Risks Resulting from the Introduction of Health Apps and Wearables into the German Statutory Health Care System: A Scoping Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Health apps and wearables enjoy currently an increasing popularity. Yet, there are still many concerns, which discourage a large group of people from using these technologies. Hence, there is currently very limited research on this recent field of study availa-ble. However, it is assumed that the use of PGHD within the health care sector has a great potential. The use of self-tracked data might lead to an advancement in terms of diagnosis and R&D. Technologies such as AI and big data could assess large amounts of data and simplify the detection of certain trends and the prediction of disease.
Objective:
This study aims to systematically review articles on health apps and wearables and get a general overview about the current state of research on this very recent field of interest. Furthermore, this study aims to answer the research question; to what extent could the use of mHealth and the processing of self-tracked data from health apps and wearables be considered beneficial?
Methods:
The systematic literature review was conducted by scoping studies within the databases PubMed and Google Scholar using the keywords health apps and wearables. From 77 identified articles published in English language in 2015 – March 2019, 40 articles were discussed in this paper, using a qualitative thematic analysis approach.
Results:
Four key themes were identified within the articles; effectivity of health apps and wearables to improve health and fitness, the user group of health apps and wearables, the potential of PGHD in the health care sector and concerns and potential data priva-cy risks. Within these themes, three main stages of potential benefits for the health care system were identified; using of health apps and wearables, continuing to use health apps and wearables and sharing PGHD with different agents in the health care sector. Hence, all authors agree that long-term studies and empirical research is still very limited in this field.
Conclusions:
The main benefit of using health apps and wearables and of incorporating PGHD into the German health care system seems to lie within the field of preventive care, patient empowerment and the additional and improved monitoring of chronically ill patients. Hence, there is more research in this field of study needed.
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