Background: Smartphone mobile health (mHealth) apps have the potential to enhance access to health care services and address health care disparities, especially in low-resource settings. However, when developed without attention to equity and inclusivity, mHealth apps can also exacerbate health disparities. Understanding and creating solutions for the disparities caused by mHealth apps is crucial for achieving health equity. There is a noticeable gap in research that comprehensively assesses the entire spectrum of existing health apps and extensively explores apps for specific health priorities from a health care and public health perspective. In this context, with its vast and diverse population, India presents a unique context for studying the landscape of mHealth apps.
Objective: This study aimed to create a comprehensive dataset of mHealth apps available in India with an initial focus on heart disease (HD)-related apps.
Methods: We collected individual app data from apps in the "medical" and "health and fitness" categories from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store in December 2022 and July 2023, respectively. Using natural language processing techniques, we selected HD apps, performed statistical analysis, and applied latent Dirichlet allocation for clustering and topic modeling to categorize the resulting HD apps.
Results: We collected 118,555 health apps from the Apple App Store and 108,945 health apps from the Google Play Store. Within these datasets, we found that approximately 1.7% (1990/118,555) of apps on the Apple App Store and 0.5% (548/108,945) on the Google Play Store included support for Indian languages. Using monograms and bigrams related to HD, we identified 1681 HD apps from the Apple App Store and 588 HD apps from the Google Play Store. HD apps make up only a small fraction of the total number of health apps available in India. About 90% (1496/1681 on Apple App Store and 548/588 on Google Play Store) of the HD apps were free of cost. However, more than 70% (1329/1681, 79.1% on Apple App Store and 423/588, 71.9% on Google Play Store) of HD apps had no reviews and rating-scores, indicating low overall use.
Conclusions: Our study proposed a robust method for collecting and analyzing metadata from a wide array of mHealth apps available in India through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. We revealed the limited representation of India's linguistic diversity within the health and medical app landscape, evident from the negligible presence of Indian-language apps. We observed a scarcity of mHealth apps dedicated to HD, along with a lower level of user engagement, as indicated by reviews and app ratings. While most HD apps are financially accessible, uptake remains a challenge. Further research should focus on app quality assessment and factors influencing user adoption.
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