Regulatory Standards and Guidance for the Use of Health Apps for Self-Management in Sub-Saharan Africa: Scoping Review.

Background: Health apps are increasingly recognized as crucial tools for enhancing health care delivery. Many countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, can substantially benefit from using health apps to support self-management and thus help to achieve universal health coverage and the third sustainable development goal. However, most health apps published in app stores are of unknown or poor quality, which poses a risk to patient safety.

Regulatory standards and guidance for the use of health applications for self-management in Africa: scoping review protocol.

Introduction: Despite health applications becoming ubiquitous and with enormous potential to facilitate self-management, regulatory challenges such as poor application quality, breach of data privacy and limited interoperability have impeded their full adoption. While many countries now have digital health-related policies/strategies, there is also a need for regulatory standards and guidance that address key regulatory challenges associated with the use of health applications. Currently, it is unclear the status of countries in Africa regarding regulatory standards and guidance that address the use of health applications.

Impact of mobile health applications on self-management in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus: protocol of a systematic review.

Introduction: The emergence of mobile health (mHealth) solutions, particularly mHealth applications (apps), has shown promise in self-management of chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). While majority of the previous systematic reviews have focused on the effectiveness of mHealth apps in improving treatment outcomes in patients with T2DM, there is a need to also understand how mHealth apps influence self-management of T2DM. This is crucial to ensure improvement in the design and use of mHealth apps for T2DM.