JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

A prodigious number of mobile health apps have flooded the market. The lack of guidelines for identifying high-quality apps from the overwhelming number of available apps creates confusion forestalling clinical adoption.

Objective:

The Defense Health Agency’s (DHA) Connected Health Branch developed the app rating inventory (ARI), an objective rating system with capability for broad application across condition areas.

Methods:

During the development of the ARI, three rounds of testing were conducted to enhance the tool’s performance, reduce redundancy, validate the ARI’s broad application, and assess potential subjectivity.

Results:

The ARI is a 28-item, three-criterion tool. The evidence criterion contains six items, and the content and customizability criterion each contain eleven items. Scoring is based on a simple binary system: either the app contains the feature or it does not. The 28 items are weighted equally; no one item is considered more (or less) important than any other. Each rated app receives four scores: a score for evidence, content, and customizability, and a total score (the sum of the three categories.). Higher scores indicate that the app obtained a positive score on more items than a similar app with a lower score. The evidence, content and customizability scores allow a clinician to make focused decisions when selecting an app for clinical use.

Conclusions:

Using a two-phased process (market research followed by ratings), the ARI is able to evaluate apps for evidence, content and customizability. Scoring systems provide guidance; they filter down hundreds of apps in a disease category to a handful for consideration. Indeed, apps are not new medicine; in many cases, they are a novel delivery system for proven interventions.