Mobile health smartphone applications (mHealth apps) are increasingly being used in healthcare to support professionals in their clinical practice or help patients self-manage their conditions. They can, for example, help patients register the site and intensity of pain in different parts of the body, or collect data on mood or specific health-related events. However, not all apps are equal in quality and functionality.
Researchers have been conducting and publishing systematic reviews of commercial and publicly available mHealth apps to identify them and to assess their quality, functionality and technical features. Systematic reviews of mHealth apps cover commercially available products, rather than articles reported on in the scientific literature. There is no guidance for researchers nor publishers on how to report them, leading to variation in how authors report their review for publication, with some omitting crucial information, and to uncertainty about the robustness of reviews, which may compromise their trustworthiness and usefulness. Ultimately, this contributes to research waste and misinterpretation by patients and healthcare professionals.
Given the similarity to systematic literature reviews and, as many authors of mHealth app reviews already report their work using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guideline, a group from the University of Manchester is developing a new guideline (CAPPRRI) which builds on PRISMA but is unique to reviews of mHealth apps.
The authors, supported by the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration for Greater Manchester, started with a scoping review of the literature and they plan to conduct a Delphi study and a consensus meeting to decide on the items to be reported. The group plans to publish the reporting guideline materials, as open access documents, in 2026.
- Read the protocol for the scoping review
- Read the results of the scoping review
Registered: 22 November 2023
Last updated: 25 April 2024; 7 February 2025
Contact: Norina Gasteiger, University of Manchester Email: [email protected]