Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Nov 20, 2019
Date Accepted: Sep 27, 2020
Taking the pulse of medical apps for patients in Spanish. A retrospective study conducted with Google tools
ABSTRACT
Background:
There are a growing number of medicine and health apps in the App Store and Google Play repositories, and most of them are in English. Furthermore, little is known about Spanish health apps domain and its evolution.
Objective:
The aim of the study was to perform a retrospective descriptive analysis of medical apps for patients in the Spanish language selected using Google search tools over a 5-year period and compare the results using reproducible methodology to obtain a better knowledge of the medical apps available in Spanish Language.
Methods:
Over a 5-year period medical apps were captured using a Google-based methodology. Keywords of the first 14 categories of the ICD 10 were selected, and in December of each year searches of the URLs of Google Play and the App Store were conducted using Google Advanced Search. The first 10 results were taken and apps meeting the inclusion criteria were selected and rated with the iSYScore method
Results:
Out of a sample of 1358 apps, 136 met the inclusion criteria. Endocrinology (diabetes), Respiratory (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and allergies) and neurology (multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease) were the three main categories. Few apps were maintained over the 5 years. Only 10/136 were maintained for three years or more. There was a large number of original apps in other languages translated into Spanish (41.2 %). In the last year of the study, the main reason (30%) for discarding an app was the date of the last update.
Conclusions:
The market of Spanish apps is fragile, showing a trend towards entering a recession phase according to the Gartner curve model.
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