Just a note of three papers recently published:

1. Kuehn BM. Is There an App to Solve App Overload?. JAMA. 2015;313(14):1405-1407. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.2381

…patients’ concerns about day-to-day condition management weren’t fully addressed. Many were frustrated, and some didn’t follow her guidance because they weren’t seeing result…

“It’s such a herculean effort [identifying useful apps]”

2. Deborah Lupton, Annemarie Jutel, ‘It’s like having a physician in your pocket!’ A critical analysis of self-diagnosis smartphone apps, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 133, May 2015, Pages 128-135, ISSN 0277-9536, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.04.004. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953615002245)

More than 100,000 mobile phone software applications (‘apps’) have been designed for the dissemination of health and medical information and healthcare and public health initiatives. This article presents a critical analysis of self-diagnosis smartphone apps directed at lay people that were available on the Apple App Store and Google Play in mid-April 2014.

Here the focus is on apps for diagnosis.

3. Husain, I. and D. Spence (2015). Can healthy people benefit from health apps? BMJ, 350:h1887  http://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h1887

I noticed this bit: “[apps] can help doctors to hold patients accountable for their behaviour”. Apps are often presented as ‘patient empowering’ but this suggests different perspectives.