JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Health applications or apps, as they are commonly known, can allow those with diabetes to access care easier, monitor their condition and potentially reduce the number of times they need to attend healthcare appointments. The development pipeline for different apps may differ widely before the apps are released for download or purchase as many teams do not have significant funding to enable iterative patient testing and feedback cycles and accessing patients to provide such feedback can be difficult.

Objective:

Two guidelines (DTAC, 20211; NICE,20222) were created to help decide how useful health apps are and to help app creators ensure that app development pathways adhere to accepted best practices.

Methods:

We conducted a systematic review of publications to identify recent diabetes apps presented in the literature and assessed their adherence to the DTAC 2021,1 and NICE 20222 guidelines during development.

Results:

Our results show that many of the studies miss crucial parts of the development pathway, such as testing whether the apps test what they are meant to test or taking into consideration the needs of diverse populations.

Conclusions:

We recommend adopting these guidelines more widely and consistently and that journals should request a checklist demonstrating the extent to which the study adheres prior to manuscript submission. Clinical Trial: The review was registered on PROSPERO in April 2022 (CRD42022322040) and conducted according to our pre-established protocol. https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=322040