Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jul 14, 2021
Date Accepted: Oct 27, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Nov 8, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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 Applications Leveraged in the COVID-19 Pandemic in East and South-East Asia: A Review and Content Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
The COVID-19 pandemic led to increased attention to digital tools to support governmental public health policies in East and South-East Asia. Mobile applications (or apps) related to COVID-19 continue to emerge and evolve with a wide variety of characteristics and functions. However, there is a paucity of studies evaluating such apps, with most of the available studies conducted in the early days of the pandemic.
Objective:
This study aimed to examine free apps developed or supported by governments in East and South-East Asian region and highlight their key characteristics and functions. Also, we aimed to interpret how other COVID-19 policies were associated with the introduction of these apps.
Methods:
We systematically searched for mobile apps in Apple App Store and Google Play Store and analysed the contents of eligible apps. The mobile apps released or updated between 1 March 2020 and 7 May 2021 in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, China, Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines were included. The CoronaNet Research Project database was also examined to examine the timeline of public health policy commencement dates to the release dates of the included apps.
Results:
Of the 1,943 mobile apps initially identified, 46 were eligible, with almost 70% of the mobile apps being intended for the general public. The most common function was health monitoring, followed by raising public health awareness through education and information dissemination. Significantly, most apps for quarantine monitoring were mandatory for the target users or a population subset. Most mobile apps emerged close to the public health policy commencement dates in the early stages of the pandemic. Mobile apps with functions related to COVID-19 vaccines began to appear parallel to vaccination rollout.
Conclusions:
In East and South-East Asia, most governments employed mobile health apps as adjuncts to public health measures in this pandemic for tracking COVID-19 cases and delivering credible information.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.