Monitoring of Cardiovascular Diseases: An Analysis of the Mobile Applications Available in the Google Play Store

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases have always been here, but there has been an increase in their numbers over time. Even though there are in the digital world a few applications to help with this kind of problem, there are not enough to fulfill the needs of the patients. This study reviews mobile applications that allow patients to monitor and report cardiovascular diseases. It presents a review of 14 mobile applications that were free to download in Portugal and classified and compared according to their characteristics. The selection criteria combined the following keywords: “patient”, “cardiac/or heart”, “report”, and (“tracking” or “monitoring”). Based on the analysis, we point out the errors of the applications and present some solutions. To finish, we investigated how mobile applications can help patients track and self-report cardiovascular diseases.