Title
Why mobile health app overload drives us crazy, and how to restore the sanity.
Abstract
Smartphones and tablet computers have become an integral part of our lives. One of their key features is the possibility of installing third-party apps. These apps can be very helpful for improving health and healthcare. However, medical professionals and citizens are currently being overloaded with health apps. Consequently, they will have difficulty with finding the right app, and information and features are fragmented over too many apps, thereby limiting their usefulness.In order to combat health app overload, suppliers of apps need to do three things. One, join the open source movement, so that a few apps can work as gateway to medical information by incorporating information from different sources. Two, standardize content, so that the information provided via apps is readable. And third, in order to prevent information overload from occurring within an app, content should be personalized towards an individual's characteristics and context.Suppliers of medical information and features need to join the open source movement and must make use of standardized medical information formats, in order to allow third parties to create valuable, mobile gateway apps. This can prevent the occurrence of health app overload. By going along in these trends, we can make health apps achieve the impact on healthcare quality and citizens' health many of us envision.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1186/1472-6947-13-23
BMC Med. Inf. & Decision Making
Keywords
Field
DocType
health informatics,benchmarking
Telemedicine,Health care,World Wide Web,Internet privacy,Sanity,Information Dissemination,Health informatics,Medicine,Limiting,Personalization
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
1
1472-6947
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
1.63
7
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lex van Velsen113915.58
Desirée J M A Beaujean2151.97
Julia E. W. C. van Gemert-Pijnen3688.71