The Rise and Need for Mobile Apps for Maternal and Child Health Care in China: Survey Based on App Markets.
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BACKGROUND Mobile health services are thriving in the field of maternal and child health in China due to expansions in the field of electronic health and the introduction of the two child policy There are numerous maternal and child health apps in computer stores but the exact number of apps number of downloads and features of these apps is not known OBJECTIVE This study aimed to explore the use of maternal and child health apps in Android and iOS app stores and to describe the key functional features of the most popular apps with the purpose of providing insight into further research and development of maternal and child health mobile health products METHODS The researchers conducted a search in the 3 most popular Android app stores Tencent MyApp Baidu Mobile Assistant and 360 Mobile Assistant and the iTunes App Store in China All apps regarding family planning contraception and preparing for pregnancy pregnancy and perinatal care neonatal care and health and development for children under 6 years were included in the initial analysis Maternal and child health mobile apps with predominant features of product marketing children s songs animation or games were excluded from the study The 50 most frequently used apps in each of the Android stores as well as the iTunes store a total of 78 deduplicated apps were selected and downloaded for an in depth analysis RESULTS A total of 5276 Android apps and 877 iOS apps developed for maternal and child health care were identified Of the 78 most frequently used apps 43 55 apps focused on one stage of MCH care mainly targeting child care 25 apps and before pregnancy care 11 apps whereas 35 45 of the apps covered 2 or more stages most of which 32 apps included both pregnancy and child care services The app features that were commonly adopted by the popular apps were health education communication health status self monitoring a diary reminders and counseling Within the app feature of health status self monitoring the researchers found 47 specific tools supporting activities such as pregnancy preparation fetal heart monitoring blood glucose and blood pressure monitoring and doctor visits A few apps were equipped with external devices n 3 or sensors No app with intelligent decision support features to support disease management for conditions such as gestational diabetes and pregnancy induced hypertension was found A small number of apps n 5 had a Web connection with hospital information systems to support appointment making payments hospital service guidance or checking of laboratory results CONCLUSIONS There are thousands of maternal and child health apps in the Chinese market Child care pregnancy and before pregnancy were the mostly covered maternal and child health stages in that order Various app features and tools were adopted by maternal and child health apps but the use of internal or external sensors intelligent decision support and tethering with existing hospital information systems was rare and these features need more research and development