Study published in Sage Journals aimed to study the effectiveness of mobile health applications in cancer screening
Iranian researchers, from the University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, published the paper The Impact of Mobile Health on Cancer Screening: A Systematic Review. The authors consider that emerging technologies such as mobile health can be used for cancer screening. So, their study focused on examining how effective mobile health apps are for cancer screening.
The method used consisted of the review of five databases, for the systematic review of study literature related to the use of mobile health applications in cancer screening. In addition, it was set from 1 January 2008 to 31 January 2019. The search result showed a total of 23 articles that met the inclusion criteria and were subsequently reviewed for evaluation.
According to the review carried out by the authors, mobile health or mHealth “mHealth can improve continuous health monitoring of both populations and individuals. mHealth has the potential to improve health outcome, support chronic disease self-management, reduce cost, enhance efficiency and decrease the number of patient visits to healthcare facilities, and provide on-demand, localized and personalized interventions.”
The authors highlight the role of mobile health in detecting cancers or cancer producers at an early stage, prior to symptoms. “mHealth technologies play an important role in helping cancer patients to become active participants in their care. Given the ubiquity of mobile devices and the omnipresent wireless connectivity, mHealth solutions have the capability to provide just-in-time support that is both adaptive and targeted to user needs.”
Such solutions are often used for patient-centered planning and generation, such as controlling the late effects of cancer and its treatments, as well as promoting changes that benefit patient quality of life and behavior.
“The development of mHealth applications in cancer screening is a low-cost and easy-to-use strategy that appears to be appreciated by patients and caregivers, and which could potentially improve the quality of healthcare,” the authors mention in the article.
Finally, the results obtained in the literature review identified that all articles mentioned positive effects in their analyses on applications in cancer screening. In general, the mobile applications used had various functions such as providing information, planning and education to patients, so they offered improvements in the quality of life of the patient.
