Mobile applications for elderly healthcare: A systematic mapping

Context The increase in the population aging has brought more significant concern about how proper care will be provided to the elderly in the future. Thus, the development of technological solutions for the health domain has gained more prominence. Joining this scenario to the growing use of mobile devices for daily activities, several mobile applications focused on the elderly healthcare have been developed with healthcare and software engineer professionals involved. However, there is no survey to help both professionals to take decisions on the target of application, elderly profile, empirical validation techniques, among others. Thus, the following question arises: how have mobile applications for elderly healthcare been addressed in the literature in the past years? Objective To identify the state of the art in the literature concerned with the development of mobile applications for elderly healthcare, considering healthcare and software Engineering viewpoints. Method We performed a systematic mapping conducted by health and software engineering researchers to provide an interdisciplinary investigation of the papers that address mobile applications for elderly healthcare, summarizing the data collected under the following classification: target of application, older adult profile, spatial-temporal distribution, techniques for empirical validation and type of software engineering research. Results We found a total of 2533 papers and, after applying our eligibility criteria, we got 149. We observed aspects related to the digital health initiative type, using the classification proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO), the elderly profile prioritized by the application, the spatial-temporal distribution of the studies, the empirical validation type, and the research contribution of each analyzed paper to the software engineering area. Conclusions Regarding the WHO classification, we noticed that two categories were more frequently found, Clients and Data Services, and that none of the mobile apps were classified in the Health System Manager category. The data extraction result also reveals that most of the applications found in the literature focused on the independent elderly. Moreover, we observed that most of the studies were proposals of solutions for elderly health and the validation process of these solutions generally consisted of controlled experiments and usability evaluations. At last, the research focused on mobile applications for elderly healthcare has been performed mostly by developed countries.


Germany 2016
VitaDock + is an app that sychronizes informatin capted by a smartband in order to track activities.

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Assist-Me, a volunteer mobile emergency system to assist elderly people Mallat, Hady Khaddaj and Abdulrazak, Bessam Canada 2014 Assist-me is a platform with two apps. The first one for elderly people that require emergency assistance and the second for caregivers volunteers who receive the request.

Germany 2015
Medication Plan is an app which aims at supporting regular and correct intake of medication and documentation of vital parameters.

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Health Promotion using Tablet Technology with Older Adult African American Methadone Clients: A Case Study Brusoski, Melissa and Rosen, Daniel USA 2017 Ovoo is an videoconference app that was used in this study to evaluate the feasibility of tablet for older adult in a educational initiative.
KeepSafe: Wristband device for heart-rate monitoring Pinto, Vitor and Sousa, Raquel and Goncalves, Gil Portugal 2017 A mobile application that integrates a system for heart rate monitoring by capted data through a smartband.

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Detection of episodes of major depression in older adults through physiological markers and movement patterns: Case study Edwing, Almeida C. and Marco, Ferruzca N. and Ivan, Guitierrez P. Mexico 2016 A mobile application that integrates a system for heart rate monitoring through data captured using a wristband.

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Evaluation of a mobile home care platform lessons learned and practical guidelines Panagopoulos, Christos and Kalatha, Eirini and Tsanakas, Panayiotis and Maglogiannis, Ilias Greece 2014 The study talnks about two applications, the first BioAssist is an app that integrates a health care system to communicate with the cloud-based platform services and also acts as a platform gateway to the various sensors and smartwatches and the other "iTriage" system enables users to look up symptoms and derive possible causes, treatment options procedures and common complications.
Healthcare system for elders with automatic drug label detection Tangtisanon, Pikulkaew Thailand 2018 An Android app thats focuses on medicine taking system in order to give the elders better quality of life by solving major problems which are medicine taking and monitoring issue.

Fall detection using wearable accelerometers and smartphone
Basili, Luca and DeMaso-Gentile, Giuseppe and Scavongelli, Cristiano and Orcioni, Simone and Pirani, Stefano and Conti, Massimo Italy 2014 An application crated to fall detection on the elderly and to send emergency alarms with the elder's localization.

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Empowering the elderly: Implementation of navigation assistance application for public transportation Heinonen, Samuli and Siira, Erkki Finland 2017 The ASSISTANT is an app that provides Navigation assistance on the public transportation for the elderly. The app comunicates with the user via audio and visual guidance. Knock-to-panic is an app for emergency signal detection that enables users to send an alarm signal to an emergency service, providing an unobtrusive method for elderly monitoring or safety protection.  Patient-centered tablet application for improving medication adherence after a drug-eluting stent Shah, V. and Dileep, A. and Dickens, C. and Groo, V. and Welland, B. and Field, J. and Baumann, M. and Flores, J.D. and Shroff, A. and Zhao, Z. and Yao, Y. and Wilkie, D.J. and Boyd, A.D.

USA 2017
A patient-centered educational tablet application thats focused in increase in patient knowledge about dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) and medication possession ratio (MPR).

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Design an interactive game app of horticultural therapy for older adults Lai, Pin-Yi and Chen, Chien-Hsu Taiwan 2015 A game app of horticultural therapy for aged people.

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Helping the elderly with physical exercise: Development of persuasive mobile intervention sensitive to elderly cognitive decline Alsaqer, Mohammed and Chatterjee, Samir Saudi Arabia 2017 The App is called Adherece Booster (AdBo) and is designed to encourage, guide and monitor the progress of older people in their daily exercises.