JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mobile health (mHealth) is a major source of health management systems such as health promotion behavior, chronic disease, and mental illness. Moreover, mHealth, a new model of digital healthcare in need of change due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will increase and demand for use worldwide. Accordingly, interest in health care in everyday life and the importance of mobile health are growing.

Objective:

We developed a MibyeongBogam (MBBG) application that evaluates the user’s subhealth status by use of a smartphone and provides a health management method based on that user’s subhealth status for use in everyday life. The primary objective of this study was to compare health status awareness after the use of the MBBG application between the intervention and control groups, and to evaluate the application’s practicality.

Methods:

This study was a prospective, open-label, parallel group, randomized controlled trial as an intervention for MBBG. The study was conducted at two hospitals in Korea with 150 healthy people in their 30s and 40s, at a 1:1 allocation ratio. Participants visited the hospital three times: pre-intervention, intermediate visit six weeks after intervention, and final visit 12 weeks after intervention. Key endpoints were measured at the first visit before intervention and at 12 weeks after intervention. The primary outcome was the awareness of subhealth status and secondary outcomes were health status, health-promoting behaviors, and motivation for healthy behaviors.

Results:

The primary outcome, subhealth awareness, tended to slightly increase in both groups after the uncompensated intervention, but there was no significant difference between groups (MBBG group = 23.69±0.25, control group = 23.1±0.25, p=0.088). In the case of secondary outcomes, only some variables of subhealth status showed significant differences between the two groups after intervention, and the intervention group showed an improvement in the total score of subhealth (p = 0.025), sleep disturbance (p = 0.024), depression (p = 0.003), anger (p = 0.01), and anxiety symptoms (p = 0.009) compared to the control group.

Conclusions:

In this study, the MBBG application showed positive potential for improving the health, especially the mental health, of individuals without particular health problems. However, the effects of the application on health-promoting behaviors were not clearly evaluated. Therefore, further studies to assess improvements in health after the use of personalized health management programs provided by the MBBG application would need to be performed. It is thought that the MBBG application would be useful for the general public, who are not diagnosed with a disease but cannot enjoy an optimal daily life due to discomfort, to seek strategies that can improve their health. Clinical Trial: Clinical Research Information Service, KCT0003488. (https://cris.nih.go.kr/cris/search/search_result_st01.jsp?seq=14379)