H_pe for mHealth: more "y" or "o" on the horizon?
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Date
2013-04-30
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Abstract
OBJECTIVE Efforts in the domain of mobile health or mHealth have been criticized for the unfettered proliferation of pilots and a lack of a rigorous evidence base to support these strategies In this letter we present the response of a group of researchers in the mHealth community to the recent calls for evidence issued by global health and funding agencies We support our conclusions through a summary of the numerous ongoing mHealth studies listed in the US federal clinical trial registry METHODS We conducted a search on the US federal clinicaltrials gov database using the keywords mHealth mobile or cell AND phone to obtain 1678 results of studies We manually inspected each result to check if it fit the purview of an mHealth study Studies that were terminated or withdrawn prior to submission were excluded RESULTS We identified 215 unique mHealth studies that were registered in the clinicaltrials gov database of which 8 4 n 18 were observational in nature while the remaining 91 6 n 197 were interventional Of the 215 studies 81 8 n 176 studies used a classical randomized trial design and 40 new studies were added to the database between May and November 2012 alone Based on these results we posit that the field is entering a new era where a body of rigorous evaluation of mHealth strategies is rapidly accumulating CONCLUSIONS The transition into an era of evidence based mHealth supports our position that innovation in this domain can be evaluated with the same rigor as other public health strategies attenuating some of the hype previously associated with mHealth