JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mobile health applications are used to improve the quality of health care. These apps are changing the current scenario in healthcare and their number is increasing.

Objective:

This paper performs an analysis of the current status on mobile health technologies and applications for medical emergencies. The authors aim to synthesize the existing body of knowledge to provide relevant insights for this topic. Moreover, the authors want to identify common threads and gaps to support new challenging, interesting and relevant research directions.

Methods:

This document reviews the main relevant papers and applications available in the literature. The PRISMA methodology is used in this review. The search criteria have been conducted using systematic methods to select papers and applications. On the one hand, a bibliographic review has been carried out in different search databases to collect papers related to each application in the health emergencies field using defined criteria. On the other hand, a review of mobile applications in the two virtual storage platforms (Google Play and App Store) has been carried out. These virtual stores refer to the Android and iOS operating systems, respectively.

Results:

In the literature review, 28 papers in the field of medical emergencies are included. These studies have been collected and are selected according to the established criteria. Moreover, the authors propose a taxonomy using six groups of applications. In total, 324 mobile applications were found where 59% corresponded to the Google Play and 41% corresponded to the App Store.

Conclusions:

The authors found that 100% of the applications on Google Play are free and in the App Store 55.5% that are paid. The price ranges from $ 0.89 to $ 5.99. Moreover, 39% of the included studies are related to warning systems for emergency systems and 21% are associated with disaster management applications.