Health Apps for the Most Prevalent Conditions

In the last years, significant improvements in communications and technology have boosted the m-health to the point of being available thousands of health apps for smartphones and tablets. The main aim of this paper is to develop a study of the existing apps in the most important commercial stores for the 5 most prevalent health conditions issued by the last update of the

Global Burden of Disease

by the World Health Organization, understanding prevalence as the number of individuals who have the disease or condition at any moment. These conditions are iron-deficiency anemia, hearing loss, migraine, low vision and asthma. For this objective, it has been carried out a review of the apps for these conditions on the most important apps stores and an in-depth analysis of a sample of reference apps related to them. 356 relevant apps were found on the stores Google play, iTunes, BlackBerry World and Windows Phone Apps+Games in February 2013. From these apps, the most relevant of each condition by specific selection criteria were selected for being analyzed. Some interesting findings could be deduced from the results obtained. There is an alarming low number of apps for Black- Berry compared to the rest of systems. Despite anemia is the most prevalent condition, there are very few apps for it and no one aimed for patients. There are more apps for migraine and asthma than for the rest and they are divided into informative and monitoring apps whereas the majority of those for hearing loss and low vision are assistive.