The use of smartphones for health research
Abstract
Because of their growing popularity and functionality, smartphones are increasingly valuable potential tools for health and medical research. Using ResearchKit, Apple's open-source platform to build applications ("apps") for smartphone research, collaborators have developed apps for researching asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and Parkinson disease. These research apps enhance widespread participation by removing geographical barriers to participation, provide novel ways to motivate healthy behaviors, facilitate high-frequency assessments, and enable more objective data collection. Although the studies have great potential, they also have notable limitations. These include selection bias, identity uncertainty, design limitations, retention, and privacy. As smartphone technology becomes increasingly available, researchers must recognize these factors to ensure that medical research is conducted appropriately. Despite these limitations, the future of smartphones in health research is bright. Their convenience grants unprecedented geographic freedom to researchers and participants alike and transforms the way clinical research can be conducted.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
A considerable proportion of participants stopped using the app over the 8-week study, although attrition appeared somewhat lower compared to similar studies of mHealth apps.
“In addition, a considerable proportion of participants stopped using the app over the course of the 8 week study, although attrition appeared to be somewhat lower compared to similar studies of mHealth apps (42, 44).”
From Which Components of a Smartphone Walking App Help Users to Reach Personalized Step Goals? Results From an Optimization Trial (2020) · cites this paper as [44]
Cites
Goetz, C. G., Tilley, B. C., Shaftman, S. R., Stebbins, G. T., Fahn, S., Martinez‐Martin, P., Poewe, W., Sampaio, C., Stern, M. B., Dodel, R., et al. (2008) · Movement Disorders · doi:10.1002/mds.22340 · Cited by 7,536 · see citing works
External validity of randomised controlled trials: “To whom do the results of this trial apply?”
Rothwell, P. M. (2005) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(04)17670-8 · Cited by 2,544 · see citing works
Healthcare via Cell Phones: A Systematic Review
Krishna, S., Boren, S. A., & Balas, E. A. (2009) · Telemedicine and e-Health · doi:10.1089/tmj.2008.0099 · Cited by 882 · see citing works
Detecting and monitoring the symptoms of Parkinson's disease using smartphones: A pilot study
Arora, S., Venkataraman, V., Zhan, A., Donohue, S., Biglan, K. M., Dorsey, E. R., & Little, M. A. (2015) · Parkinsonism & Related Disorders · doi:10.1016/j.parkreldis.2015.02.026 · Cited by 387 · see citing works
Self-citationHuckvale, K., Prieto, J. T., Tilney, M., Benghozi, P.-J., & Car, J. (2015) · BMC Medicine · doi:10.1186/s12916-015-0444-y · Cited by 376 · see citing works
Wicks, P., Vaughan, T. E., Massagli, M. P., & Heywood, J. (2011) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/nbt.1837 · Cited by 362 · see citing works
Generalizability of cancer clinical trial results
Elting, L. S., Cooksley, C. D., Bekele, B. N., Frumovitz, M., Avritscher, E. B. C., Sun, C. C., & Bodurka, D. C. (2006) · Cancer · doi:10.1002/cncr.21907 · Cited by 176 · see citing works
Orri, M., Lipset, C. H., Jacobs, B. P., Costello, A. J., & Cummings, S. R. (2014) · Contemporary Clinical Trials · doi:10.1016/j.cct.2014.04.009 · Cited by 132 · see citing works
Novel Methods and Technologies for 21st-Century Clinical Trials: A Review
Dorsey, E. R., Venuto, C., Venkataraman, V., Harris, D. A., & Kieburtz, K. (2015) · JAMA Neurology · doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2014.4524 · Cited by 118 · see citing works
Self-citationBinDhim, N. F., & Trevena, L. J. (2015) · Online Journal of Public Health Informatics · doi:10.5210/ojphi.v7i2.5522 · Cited by 62 · see citing works
Valle, C. G., Tate, D. F., Mayer, D. K., Allicock, M. A., & Cai, J. (2015) · Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology · doi:10.1089/jayao.2014.0034 · Cited by 48 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Pratap, A., Neto, E. C., Snyder, P., Stepnowsky, C., Elhadad, N., Grant, D., Mohebbi, M. H., Mooney, S., Suver, C., Wilbanks, J., et al. (2020) · npj Digital Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41746-020-0224-8 · Cited by 410 · see citing works
Towards a consensus around standards for smartphone apps and digital mental health
Torous, J., Andersson, G., Bertagnoli, A., Christensen, H., Cuijpers, P., Firth, J., Haim, A., Hsin, H., Hollis, C., Lewis, S., et al. (2019) · World Psychiatry · doi:10.1002/wps.20592 · Cited by 325 · see citing works
The Asthma Mobile Health Study, a large-scale clinical observational study using ResearchKit
Chan, Y.-F. Y., Wang, P., Rogers, L., Tignor, N., Zweig, M., Hershman, S. G., Genes, N., Scott, E. R., Krock, E., Badgeley, M., et al. (2017) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/nbt.3826 · Cited by 204 · see citing works
Self-citationBy the numbers: ratings and utilization of behavioral health mobile applications
Carlo, A. D., Hosseini Ghomi, R., Renn, B. N., & Areán, P. A. (2019) · npj Digital Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41746-019-0129-6 · Cited by 164 · see citing works
The accuracy of passive phone sensors in predicting daily mood
Pratap, A., Atkins, D. C., Renn, B. N., Tanana, M. J., Mooney, S. D., Anguera, J. A., & Areán, P. A. (2019) · Depression and Anxiety · doi:10.1002/da.22822 · Cited by 119 · see citing works
Heynsbergh, N., Heckel, L., Botti, M., & Livingston, P. M. (2018) · BMC Cancer · doi:10.1186/s12885-018-4160-9 · Cited by 109 · see citing works
Rincon, E., Monteiro-Guerra, F., Rivera-Romero, O., Dorronzoro-Zubiete, E., Sanchez-Bocanegra, C. L., & Gabarron, E. (2017) · JMIR mHealth and uHealth · doi:10.2196/mhealth.8741 · Cited by 108 · see citing works
Using a smartwatch and smartphone to assess early Parkinson’s disease in the WATCH-PD study
Adams, J. L., Kangarloo, T., Tracey, B., O’Donnell, P., Volfson, D., Latzman, R. D., Zach, N., Alexander, R., Bergethon, P., Cosman, J., et al. (2023) · npj Parkinson's Disease · doi:10.1038/s41531-023-00497-x · Cited by 98 · see citing works
Shcherbina, A., Hershman, S. G., Lazzeroni, L., King, A. C., O'Sullivan, J. W., Hekler, E., Moayedi, Y., Pavlovic, A., Waggott, D., Sharma, A., et al. (2019) · The Lancet Digital Health · doi:10.1016/s2589-7500(19)30129-3 · Cited by 90 · see citing works
Klimczak, K. S., San Miguel, G. G., Mukasa, M. N., Twohig, M. P., & Levin, M. E. (2023) · Cognitive Behaviour Therapy · doi:10.1080/16506073.2023.2178498 · Cited by 88 · see citing works
“Mobile health applications in particular are becoming increasingly popular around the world, with half a billion people downloading at least one of the over 100,000 mobile health apps available (Dorsey et al., 2017).”
BackgroundCrouthamel, M., Quattrocchi, E., Watts, S., Wang, S., Berry, P., Garcia-Gancedo, L., Hamy, V., & Williams, R. E. (2018) · JMIR mHealth and uHealth · doi:10.2196/mhealth.9656 · Cited by 76 · see citing works
Kramer, J.-N., Künzler, F., Mishra, V., Smith, S. N., Kotz, D., Scholz, U., Fleisch, E., & Kowatsch, T. (2020) · Annals of Behavioral Medicine · doi:10.1093/abm/kaaa002 · Cited by 84 · see citing works
Flett, J. A. M., Conner, T. S., Riordan, B. C., Patterson, T., & Hayne, H. (2020) · Psychology & Health · doi:10.1080/08870446.2019.1711089 · Cited by 84 · see citing works
- Authors
- Dorsey, E. R., “Yvonne” Chan, Y.-F., McConnell, M. V., Shaw, S. Y., Trister, A. D., & Friend, S. H.
- Affiliations
- University of Rochester Medicine (US)
- Y.F. Chanis assistant professor, Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Department of Emergency Medicine, and director of digital health, Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York.
- Stanford Medicine (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- Sage Bionetworks (US)
- Corresponding author
- Dorsey, E. Ray
- Venue
- Academic Medicine
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2017-02
- Volume
- 92
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 157-160
- ISSN
- 1040-2446 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2343010276
- Cited by
- 154
- References
- 11
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 17 · 2020: 26 · 2019: 28 · 2018: 13 · 2017: 12
- FWCI
- 32.86
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Academic Medicine (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (P20NS092529)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Mobile Health and mHealth Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
- Keywords
- smartphones, ResearchKit, mobile health, mobile application, clinical research participation, asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, selection bias, participant retention, privacy
- MeSH terms
- Smartphone, Disease, Humans, Diagnostic Techniques and Procedures, Biomedical Research, Mobile Applications
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
