Availability of Spanish-Language Medical Apps in Google Play and the App Store: Retrospective Descriptive Analysis Using Google Tools (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Background: There are a growing number of medicine and health apps in the App Store and Google Play repositories, and most of them are in English. Furthermore, little is known about Spanish health apps’ domain and its evolution. OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to perform a retrospective descriptive analysis of medical apps for patients in the Spanish language using Google search tools over a 5-year period and compare the results using a reproducible methodology to obtain a better knowledge of the medical apps available in Spanish Language. METHODS Over a 5-year period medical apps were catalogued using a Google-based methodology. Keywords of the first 14 categories of the ICD 10 were selected, and in December of each year searches of the URLs of Google Play and the App Store were conducted using Google Advanced Search. The first 10 results were taken and apps meeting the inclusion criteria were selected and rated with the iSYScore method RESULTS Out of a sample of 1358 apps, 136 met the inclusion criteria. Endocrinology (diabetes), respiratory (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and allergies) and neurology (multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease) were the three main categories. Few apps were maintained over the 5 years. Only 10/136 were maintained for three years or more. There was a large number of original apps in other languages translated into Spanish (41.2 %). In the last year of the study, the main reason (30%) for discarding an app was the date of the last update. CONCLUSIONS The market of Spanish apps is poor; few apps have appeared repeatedly over the 5 years. Differences were found with the international market in terms of apps related to mental health, heart and circulatory system and cancer; and coincidences were found on the relevance of Apps for diabetes control. CLINICALTRIAL

Aplicaciones móviles en español para evaluación e intervención en Salud Mental: Una revisión sistemática

“…Dentro del campo de las ciencias de la salud, una revisión sistemática examina la disponibilidad de apps médicas en castellano en google play y app store, resaltando el escaso número de aplicaciones disponibles. Además, entre las categorías con menor número de resultados se encontraba la de aplicaciones de salud mental (Grau-Corral et al, 2020). Sin embargo, esta revisión no usa base de datos para la búsqueda de bibliografía, sino que usan la búsqueda avanzada de Google para encontrar apps.…”

“…Existen revisiones sistemáticas que examinan la disponibilidad de aplicaciones móviles en castellano para medicina (Grau-Corral et al, 2020) y otras que investigan la existencia de aplicaciones móviles para evaluación y tratamiento en salud mental, pero no se enfocan en aplicaciones publicadas en castellano (Miralles et al, 2020a). En definitiva, actualmente es una incógnita cómo avanza la investigación en este área en España.…”