CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell'Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni (IEIIT), Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, I-20133 Milan, Italy.
IRCCS - Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri", Dipartimento di Ambiente e Salute, Laboratorio di Epidemiologia degli Stili di Vita, Via La Masa, 19, I-20156 Milan, Italy.
J Biomed Inform. 2018 Jul;83:97-102. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2018.05.017. Epub 2018 May 28.
The need to characterize and assess health apps has inspired a significant amount of research in the past years, in search for methods able to provide potential app users with relevant, meaningful knowledge. This article presents an overview of the recent literature in this field and categorizes - by discussing some specific examples - the various methodologies introduced so far for the identification, characterization, and assessment of health apps. Specifically, this article outlines the most significant web-based resources for app identification, relevant frameworks for descriptive characterization of apps' features, and a number of methods for the assessment of quality along its various components (e.g., evidence base, trustworthiness, privacy, or user engagement). The development of methods to characterize the apps' features and to assess their quality is important to define benchmarks and minimum requirements. Similarly, such methods are important to categorize potential risks and challenges in the field so that risks can be minimized, whenever possible, by design. Understanding methods to assess apps is key to raise the standards of quality of health apps on the market, towards the final goal of delivering apps that are built on the pillars of evidence-base, reliability, long-term effectiveness, and user-oriented quality.
为了对健康类应用程序进行特征描述和评估，近年来，人们进行了大量的研究，以期找到能够为潜在用户提供相关、有意义的知识的方法。本文概述了该领域的最新文献，并通过讨论一些具体的例子，对迄今为止为识别、描述和评估健康类应用程序而引入的各种方法进行了分类。具体来说，本文概述了用于应用程序识别的最重要的基于网络的资源、应用程序特征描述的相关框架，以及用于评估质量及其各个组成部分（例如，证据基础、可信度、隐私或用户参与度）的许多方法。开发用于描述应用程序特征和评估其质量的方法对于定义基准和最低要求非常重要。同样，这些方法对于对该领域的潜在风险和挑战进行分类也很重要，以便在可能的情况下通过设计将风险最小化。了解评估应用程序的方法是提高市场上健康类应用程序质量标准的关键，最终目标是提供建立在证据基础、可靠性、长期有效性和以用户为中心的质量基础上的应用程序。
