Stroke causes approximately 12.2 million new cases and 6.5 million deaths annually, with survivors requiring coordinated care across pre-hospital, acute, rehabilitative, and preventive phases. Mobile health (mHealth) technologies, including smartphone applications, wearable sensors, and tablet-based platforms, have shown clinical potential across these contexts, yet a structured mapping of their distribution across the full stroke care continuum is lacking. We searched PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science for publications from January 2019 to March 2025. Studies evaluated mHealth interventions in which the mobile platform directly performed diagnostic, therapeutic, or rehabilitative functions in stroke populations. Of 4524 records identified, 17 met the inclusion criteria. Studies originated from eight countries and used heterogeneous designs: five randomized controlled trials, five non-randomized studies, four cohort studies, and three diagnostic accuracy studies. Median sample size was 37 participants (range 10–2249). Evidence concentrated at two poles: six studies addressed acute diagnosis and ten addressed rehabilitation, predominantly in the chronic phase. One study addressed secondary prevention; two targeted early rehabilitation, the period of maximum neuroplasticity after discharge. All seventeen studies covered a single care phase. Smartphone platforms dominated acute contexts; wearable and mixed-modality systems were confined to rehabilitation. The mHealth stroke landscape is fragmented and phase-specific, exhibiting a silo effect in which interventions operate as isolated tools rather than components of an integrated care system. An important gap is the near-absence of research in early rehabilitation. Future priorities include cross-continuum design, expansion into cognitive and secondary prevention domains, and progression toward adequately powered trials.
Koo et al. (Tue,) studied this question.