Mental and Physical Mobile Health Apps: Review

Abstract Tremendous development in mobile technologies has emerged as a powerful tool in health care with more than 160,000 mobile health apps available for download from the apps stores. However, there is a lack of meticulous testing for efficacy, reliability and accuracy of these applications. The purpose of this paper is to review the current state of the art of the development of mobile health applications dedicated to chronic and disabling diseases that are manifested by a physical or mental disability in the patient, namely: brain injury, stroke and spinal cord injury; psychoactive substance abuse and addiction, depression, stress, and anxiety. We performed search in both Android and Apple apps stores and developed a database to carry out searches’ results analysis. Many apps dedicated to diagnostic and treatment are designed without involvement of healthcare professionals and there is an inequality of users’ profiles in both mental and physical mobile apps. We plan to evaluate the usefulness, efficiency and suitability of most relevant application in the Moroccan context. Comparison and evaluation of efficacy of these applications is underway.