Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: May 12, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: May 12, 2021 - Jul 7, 2021
Date Accepted: Aug 23, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Characteristics and Quality of Mobile Applications for Prenatal Genetic Testing: An Assessment
ABSTRACT
Background:
Prenatal genetic testing is an essential part of routine prenatal care. Yet, obstetricians often lack the time to provide comprehensive prenatal genetic testing education to their patients. Pregnant women lack prenatal genetic testing knowledge, which may hinder informed decision-making during their pregnancies. Due to the rapid growth of technology, mobile applications (apps) are a potentially valuable educational tool through which pregnant women can learn about prenatal genetic testing and improve the quality of their communication with obstetricians. The characteristics, quality, and number of available apps containing prenatal genetic testing information was, however, unknown.
Objective:
To conduct the first review to identify, evaluate, and summarize currently available prenatal genetic testing mobile apps using a systematic approach.
Methods:
We searched both the Apple App Store and Google Play to find mobile apps containing prenatal genetic testing information. The quality of apps was assessed based upon criteria adapted from two commonly used and validated mobile app scoring systems including “MARS” and “APPLICATIONS”.
Results:
Sixty-four mobile apps were identified. Of these, only two apps were developed for a specific prenatal genetic test. All other apps were either pregnancy-related (95.3%) or genetics (1.6%) apps that provided prenatal genetic testing information. The majority of the apps (76.5%) were developed by commercial companies. The mean quality assessment score of the included apps was 13.5, which was equal to the average of possible theoretical score. Overall, the main weaknesses of mobile apps in this review included the limited number of prenatal genetic tests mentioned, incomprehensiveness of testing information, unreliable and missing information sources, absence of developmental testing with users (not evidenced-based), high level of readability, and lack of visual information, customization, and a text search field.
Conclusions:
Our findings suggest that the quality of prenatal genetic testing-related mobile apps must be improved, and that pregnant women should be cautious when utilizing these mobile apps for prenatal genetic testing information. Obstetricians should carefully examine mobile apps before referring any of them to their patients for use as an educational tool. Both improving the quality of existing mobile apps, and developing new, evidence-based, high-quality mobile apps targeting all prenatal genetic tests should be the focus of mobile app developers going forward.
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Copyright
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