Exploration of Digital Health Technologies

Table 2. Characteristics of the mobile applications investigated in the included studies (See Supplementary material 5 for further details).

Application characteristics	App purpose			Total number of studies n (%)
Application characteristics	Education and awareness n (%)	Clinical assistance tools n (%)	Biomarker or pathogen detection n (%)	Total number of studies n (%)
Total	3	19	5	27
Targeted users
Healthcare professionals^a	2 (67)	19 (100)	5 (100)	26 (96)
General public	1 (33)	0	0	1 (4)
Application platform
iOs and Android	1 (33)	8 (42)	0	9 (33)
Android only	2 (67)	5 (26)	5 (100)	12 (44)
NR	0	6 (32)	0	6 (22)
Application device
Tablet	0	3 (16)	1 (20)	4 (15)
Smartphone	3 (100)	13 (68)	4 (80)	20 (74)
NR	0	3 (16)	0	3 (11)
External hardware associated^b
Yes	0	6 (32)	5 (100)	11 (41)
No	3 (100)	13 (68)	0	16 (59)
Part of a larger intervention
Yes	1 (33)	9 (47)	0	10 (37)
No	2 (67)	10 (53)	5 (100)	17 (63)

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NR: not reported. ^a: Includes studies where the targeted user was not explicitly reported but assumed to be healthcare professionals from the article context. ^b: External hardware associated refers to if any external equipment was used in conjunction with the mobile application.

Supplementary materials

The supplementary materials for this article are available at: https://www.explorationpub.com/uploads/Article/file/101186_sup_1.pdf.

Declarations

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Mr. Jeremy Cullis, an experienced clinical librarian, for his guidance in developing the final search strategy and translating it to other databases.

Author contributions

KA and DK: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing. VL and LL: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing—review & editing. All authors read and approved the submitted version.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

Not applicable.

Consent to participate

Not applicable.

Consent to publication

Not applicable.

Availability of data and materials

As this study is a scoping review, all relevant data are available in the included studies.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Copyright

Publisher’s note

Open Exploration maintains a neutral stance on jurisdictional claims in published institutional affiliations and maps. All opinions expressed in this article are the personal views of the author(s) and do not represent the stance of the editorial team or the publisher.

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