Previously submitted to: JMIR mHealth and uHealth (no longer under consideration since Dec 29, 2021)
Date Submitted: Apr 26, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Mobile Health Technology Applications Supporting Self-Management of Chronic Illnesses: An Integrated Literature Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Chronic illnesses are the leading cause of death in the United States. Many chronic illnesses have better outcomes when the plan of care includes self-management of the chronic condition and the associated symptoms. There are more elderly utilizing smart phones in their daily lives than ever before. Mobile technology is improving with many mobile health applications on the market for patients to utilize for their daily self-management of chronic illnesses.
Objective:
The purpose of this review was to determine if patients that utilize mobile health applications for self-management of chronic illnesses have better compliance and outcomes than patients that utilize standard self-management methods.
Methods:
An integrated literature review was conducted to further evaluate the evidence to support utilizing mobile health-based application to manage chronic illnesses. The electronic databases of Carl S. Swisher Library and PubMed were searched with the publication parameters between 2016-2019. The search was restricted by year of publication, search phrases and certain chronic illnesses. Articles that included chronic illnesses other than diabetes, heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were excluded for the review. There were 400 records included in the original search. After duplicates were removed and the exclusion criteria applied, 12 records were applicable for this review. This review was broken down by common identified themes found throughout the articles.
Results:
This integrated literature review found mixed results related to the benefits of mHealth applications. Some of the articles reviewed showed no benefits of using mHealth applications for self-management of chronic illnesses while other articles found strong evidence to imply using this technology can have an overall impact for positive outcomes of chronic illnesses.
Conclusions:
Many of the articles reviewed did not test mobile health applications that are currently on the market for consumer use. Rather, the applications were designed specifically for the study and has not been put into consumer production. Feasibility studies indicated that it was important to have end-user input as well as healthcare professionals when designing mobile health applications to ensure ease of use and appropriate content.
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Copyright
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