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First aid, fitness and free information: selected apps to help your health
With a market value heading for €24bn, health apps are barely regulated in the US and not at all in the EU
Consumers of health apps need to ask themselves a number of questions. Photograph: Thinkstock
Tue, Nov 10, 2015
Jacob Tietelbaum is a medical doctor, bestselling author and regular contributor to theHuffington Post. His wife, Laurie, is a nutritionist. Together, they have developed Cures A-Z, one of the most popular smartphone health apps. The app, they say, is science-based and contains hundreds of cures, as well as a nutrition guide.
At a glance, the credentials of the app’s creators look impressive. Scratch the surface, however, and Tietelbaum has been ordered by the US Food and Drug Administration to stop selling unproven treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome. Both Jacob and Laurie promote a treatment for allergies and autism that has been described by the medical journalCurrent Allergy & Clinical Immunologyas “the most unsubstantiated allergy treatment proposed to date”.
Can you really trust their health app?
Indeed, as the market for health apps – estimated to be worth about $26 billion (€24 billion) by 2017 – continues to grow, can you trust any of them?
Dr Steve Kerrigan is a senior lecturer in pharmacology at the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland (RCSI), which has recently developed the RCSI MyHealth App. “There has been an explosion in the number of health apps, and there may be up to half a million more released in the next short while,” he says. “Some of the apps are really good and useful. Couch to 5k, for example, has been transformative in terms of how people approach fitness, while a first aid app could be useful as an educational tool.”
Consumers of health apps need to ask themselves a number of questions, says Kerrigan. “Who is the developer? Are they reputable? Are they medically trained, or are they an 18-year-old sitting in their bedroom who is really good at designing apps? If they’re not a medical specialist, have they partnered with trained experts or a reputable institution?
“In particular, people should be very, very careful about trusting any app that claims to diagnose a medical condition: people go through college for six years or more to learn how to do this. An app that tells you, for example, that your blood sugar is fine based on what you ate today, should be treated with caution.”
A medical degree or background isn’t a requirement for a health app developer. In the US, the FDA regulates only a handful of medical apps, and most of those are for healthcare professionals to use with their patients, rather than the sort which can be casually downloaded at home.
In the EU, mobile apps are not regulated. Ceara Treacy, a postgraduate researcher in mobile medical apps at the Regulatory Software Research Centre in Dundalk IT says this is allowing room for innovation. She points out that any technology which claims to treat or diagnose a medical condition is considered a medical device and must go through a regulatory process. But manufacturers can easily get around this by stating that their product is for entertainment or information purposes only.
In a burgeoning body of academic research into health and fitness apps, opinion is divided as to how beneficial they are. Writing for theBritish Medical Journal, Iltifat Hussein, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine and editor of iMedicalApps.com, says these apps can help people take control of their health and in some cases improve their health outcomes.
About 40 per cent of apps are discarded after the novelty wears off. Some can be genuinely useful for patients with particular conditions or for those who want to improve their health and wellbeing. Others may be relatively useless: do you really need to know your oxygen level, pulse rate or a foetal heart rate, and what can you do with the information? Then there are apps that claim to have legitimate health benefits, where caution is advised.
All this, however, is before the privacy implications are even considered. Healthcare information is highly sensitive and worth up to 10 times more than stolen credit card details, as fraudsters can use the data to buy medicines and medical equipment.
Daragh O’Brien is the managing director of Castlebridge Associates, a strategic data-protection and information-management consultancy. He says data privacy laws apply to the sensitive data generated by health and fitness. “But you can have all the regulation in the world and nobody enforcing it. Bear in mind that snake-oil salesmen have always been a feature of the medical field; without effective regulation, that data can be abused.”
A popular and free app that is used by people to evaluate their health symptoms, iTriage, states on its site that it values the privacy of its users. But read the privacy policy and iTriage indicates that it can disclose your personal data to your employer, to third parties for marketing purposes, to any company they merge with, to any government anywhere in the world, to your family. O’Brien says this would put him off using the app and they should review the policy.
Read the privacy statement on health apps, says Kerrigan. “Your name, address, height, weight and date of birth are sensitive pieces of information, so be cautious of disclosing them. And never give away your address or date of birth.”
The best health apps on the market
RCSI MyHealth
App Store and Google Play, free, developed by RCSI in conjunction with 16 health charities
Easily the standout health app for Irish users, this is a new service developed by researchers at the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland, in conjunction with the Irish Cancer Society, the Irish Heart Foundation, Diabetes Ireland, the Alzheimer Society of Ireland and 12 other organisations.
It contains health information about more than 800 specific conditions; a list of health services in Ireland ranging from emergency contact numbers to support organisations and hospital details; links to the latest health news from credible sources; and the ability to work out your body mass index.
Can you trust it?Leading clinicians from the RCSI, as well as medical health professionals from a range of health charities, have worked on it.
Privacy policy?Excellent: The app doesn’t demand any specific personal details or anything that could identify you. Your anonymised information may be gathered into statistics on usage of the app and also shared with the Irish Cancer Society.