Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Aug 27, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 27, 2020 - Oct 22, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 23, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
m-Health strategies for HIV Post-Exposure Prophylaxis: Patent Prospection, Systematic Literature Review and Systematic Search on App Stores
ABSTRACT
Background:
HIV cases continue to increase, despite having multiple prevention strategies. The new cases occur disproportionately more in men who have sex with men, and other vulnerable populations. Issues such as internalized and structural homophobia prevent these men from accessing prevention strategies such as PEP. mHealth intervention are showed to be one of the newest and preferred option to enhance PEP knowledge and access.
Objective:
Our aim was to identify and analyze applications for smart phones that address post-exposure prophylaxis to HIV.
Methods:
We conducted a descriptive-exploratory study, in three sequential phases: systematic literature review, patents analysis and application exploration. Data Sources: The review of the literature in the databases PubMed, Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Cochrane, Embase, Science Direct, Eric, Treasure and CINAHL. The second phase corresponded to an exploration of applications in the INPI, OIMP and ESPACENET patent databases. In the third phase, we performed an analysis on the two major application libraries: Google Play Store and App Stores. Review methods: At each stage, the selected studies/patents/apps were analyzed and pre-selected, according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, by reading their titles and descriptions. The applications were evaluated by name, characteristics, functions and availability for the main systems (iOS or Android). As for the patent registrations, these were analyzed descriptively according to the information retrieved from the patent bases, titles, descriptions and applicants/inventors.
Results:
in the databases, 2 studies that presented some application for smartphone were selected, both are in English, from the United States and were retrieved from Pubmed. On the other hand, there are other 2 apps that provides information about PEP, available on Playstore and AppleStore but without relation to previous studies. Conclusion: None of the selected studies reported the creation or validation of an application, this represent a gap between the number of application available and the scientific research on the field.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© 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.