Aplicações móveis validadas para a área da saúde: uma revisão integrativa

Abstract

Mobile applications are increasingly used by healthcare professionals. These tools are mostly accessed by smartphone and tablet and they can facilitate the work routine and disease monitoring. The enormous number of applications available and the speed that they can be developed and released make the quality of these applications uncertain, which reveals the necessity of proving their validity and reliability. This is an integrative literature review, which aims to identify and characterize validated health applications. The review was conducted based on five steps: problem identification; literature search; data evaluation; data analysis; presentation. The literature search was conducted between March and May of 2019 on the academic databases PubMed/MEDLINE and Web of Science with the combination of the MeSH terms “mobile applications”, “health, health survey”, “validation studies” and “mobile phone”. It was included in the review all articles that focused on validated health applications. The literature searches resulted in 509 articles, of which 32 were included in the final sample of the review. These studies presented valid applications developed for smartphones and/or tablets that had Android or iOS as operational systems. Most of the applications had the main purpose of measuring different variables, to help health professionals to screen and diagnose varied health conditions, to allow the remote monitoring of patients or to simplify the application of specific tests. This study analyzed and characterized mobile applications validated for the health field. The review shows that the number of valid health applications is still limited when compared with the number of health applications available nowadays. This reveals a potential scientific field that needs to be further explored, considering mHealth as a market in expansion and an essential product to universalize health access.